Nationality American Role Journalist Name Ralph Fox | Education University of Oxford | |
Born March 24, 1913Morrisville, Pennsylvania ( 1913-03-24 ) Alma mater Princeton UniversityJohns Hopkins UniversitySwarthmore College Doctoral students Charles H. GiffenHerman GluckAlan GoldmanH. W. KuhnSamuel J. Lomonaco, Jr.Barry MazurJohn MilnorNeville F. SmytheJohn R. Stallings Died December 27, 1936, Lopera, Spain Books The novel and the people, Portugal now, The Colonial Policy of British Imperialism | ||
Ralph Hartzler Fox (March 24, 1913 – December 23, 1973) was an American mathematician. As a professor at Princeton University, he taught and advised many of the contributors to the Golden Age of differential topology, and he played an important role in the modernization and main-streaming of knot theory.
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Biography
Ralph Fox attended Swarthmore College for two years, while studying piano at the Leefson Conservatory of Music in Philadelphia. He earned a master's degree from Johns Hopkins University, and a Ph.D. degree from Princeton University in 1939. His doctoral dissertation, On the Lusternick-Schnirelmann Category, was directed by Solomon Lefschetz. (In later years he disclaimed all knowledge of Lusternik–Schnirelmann category, and certainly never published on the subject again.) He directed 21 doctoral dissertations, including those of John Milnor, John Stallings, Francisco González-Acuña, Guillermo Torres-Diaz and Barry Mazur.
His mathematical contributions include Fox n-coloring of knots, the Fox-Artin arc, and the free differential calculus. He also identified the compact-open topology on function spaces as being particularly appropriate for homotopy theory.
Aside from his strictly mathematical contributions, he was responsible for introducing several basic phrases to knot theory: the phrases slice knot, ribbon knot, and Seifert circle all appear in print for the first time under his name, and he also popularized (if he did not introduce) the phrase Seifert surface.
He popularized the playing of the game of Go at both Princeton and the Institute for Advanced Study.