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Albert Wilansky

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Albert "Tommy" Wilansky (13 September 1921, St. John's, Newfoundland – 3 July 2017, Bethlehem, Pennsylvania) was a Canadian-American mathematician, known for introducing Smith numbers.[1][2]

Biography

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Wilansky was educated as an undergraduate at Dalhousie University, where he received an M.A. in mathematics in 1944. From 1944 to 1947 he was a graduate student at Brown University.[3] In 1947 he received his Ph.D. with advisor Clarence Raymond Adams and dissertation An application of Banach linear functionals to the theory of summability.[4]

From 1948 until his official retirement in 1992, Wilansky was a faculty member of the mathematics department of Lehigh University.[3]

He was the university’s Distinguished Professor of Mathematics for the final 14 years of his tenure. During his 44 years at Lehigh he was a Fulbright visiting professor several times, at universities in Reading (1972–1973), London (1973), Tel Aviv (1981), and Berne (1981). Outside of academia he was a consultant for the Frankford Arsenal for the year 1957–1958.[3]

Wilansky did research in analysis, specializing in summability theory, linear topological spaces, Banach algebras, and functional analysis.[3] He was the author of several books and the author or co-author of more than 80 articles. He lectured at over 50 different universities.[2] In 1969 he received the Mathematical Association of America's Lester R. Ford Award for his 1968 article Spectral Decomposition of Matrices for High School Students.[5] (The 1969 award was also given individually to 5 other mathematicians.)

Wilansky was married to his first wife from 1947 until her death in 1969. They had two daughters. He had three step-daughters from his second marriage.

He was a professional musician for a brief time as a young man and continued playing piano and clarinet and writing songs, often with his wives and daughters.[2]

Selected publications

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Articles

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Books

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References

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  1. ^ Wilansky, A. (1982). "Smith numbers". Two-Year College Mathematics Journal. 13: 21. doi:10.2307/3026531. JSTOR 3026531.
  2. ^ a b c "Obituary. Albert Wilansky". The Morning Call. Allentown, Pennsylvania. July 11, 2017.
  3. ^ a b c d Zitarelli, David E. "EPADEL: A Sesquicentennial History, 1926–2000". (See personal profile of Albert Wilansky in Chapter 6.)
  4. ^ Albert "Tommy" Wilansky at the Mathematics Genealogy Project
  5. ^ "Spectral Decomposition of Matrices for High School Students". Mathematical Association of America. (with link to PDF of article, which was published in Mathematics Magazine )
  6. ^ Stenger, Allen (October 10, 2009). "Review of Topology for analysis". MAA Reviews, Mathematical Association of America.
  7. ^ Retherford, James R. (1982). "Book Review: Locally convex spaces by H. Jarchow and Modern methods in topological vector spaces by Albert Wilansky". Bulletin of the American Mathematical Society. 7 (3): 612–615. doi:10.1090/S0273-0979-1982-15069-8. ISSN 0273-0979.
  8. ^ Stenger, Allen (April 6, 2015). "Review of Modern Methods in Topological Vector Spaces". MAA Reviews, Mathematical Association of America.