Nationality American | Name Griffith Evans Role Mathematician Doctoral advisor Maxime Bocher | |
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Born 11 May 1887 ( 1887-05-11 ) Institutions Rice UniversityUniversity of California, Berkeley Doctoral students John GergenAlfred HornKenneth May Died December 8, 1973, Berkeley, California, United States Books The logarithmic potential, discontinuous Dirichlet and Neumann problems | ||
Residence United States of America | ||
Griffith Conrad Evans (11 May 1887 – 8 December 1973) was a mathematician working for much of his career at the University of California, Berkeley. He is largely credited with elevating Berkeley's mathematics department to a top-tier research department, having recruited many notable mathematicians in the 1930s and 1940s.
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Biography
Evans earned his PhD at Harvard in 1910 under Maxime Bôcher with a dissertation on Volterra's Integral Equation, after which he did a post-doc for two years at the University of Rome on a Sheldon Fellowship from Harvard. The experience of working under Vito Volterra shaped his intellectual life and solidified his interest in the application of mathematics to a broad range of fields. Evans was then appointed assistant professor at Rice University in 1912 and promoted to professor in 1916. He married Isabel Mary John in 1917 and they would eventually have 3 children. In 1934, he moved to University of California, Berkeley to chair the mathematics department. Here, Evans was tasked with improving the department, including the initiation of a graduate program. Much of his success was due to his ability to recruit many notable research mathematicians, including Hans Lewy, Jerzy Neyman, and Alfred Tarski. His own research work was in potential theory and mathematics applied to economics. He chaired Berkeley's department until 1949 and retired in 1955, eventually becoming the namesake of Evans Hall at Berkeley.