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Ralph P. Boas Jr.

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Ralph Philip Boas, Jr (August 8, 1913 - July 25, 1992) was a mathematician, teacher, and journal editor. He wrote over 200 papers, mainly in the fields of real and complex analysis.

He was born in Walla Walla, Washington and got his A.B. degree and Ph.D. at Harvard University (Ph.D., 1937; advisor, David Widder). In 1950 he became Professor of Mathematics at Northwestern University, where he stayed until his retirement in 1980. He continued mathematical work after retiring, for instance as co-editor (with George Leitmann) of the Journal of Mathematical Analysis and Applications from 1985 to 1991.

Big Game Hunting

Boas, Frank Smithies and colleagues were behind the 1938 paper A Contribution to the Mathematical Theory of Big Game Hunting published in the American Mathematical Monthly under the pseudonym H. Pétard. The paper offers short spoofs of theories from mathematics and physics applied to the capture of lions in the Sahara desert. For example, parodying the Bolzano-Weierstrass theorem,

  • The Bolzano-Weierstrass Method. Bisect the desert by a line running N-S. The lion is either in the E portion or in the W portion; let us suppose him to be in the W portion. Bisect this portion by a line running E-W. The lion is either in the N portion or in the S portion; let us suppose him to be in the N portion. We continue this process indefinitely, constructing a sufficiently strong fence about the chosen portion at each step. The diameter of the chosen portions approaches zero, so that the lion is ultimately surrounded by a fence of arbitrarily small perimeter.

The paper became a classic of mathematical humor and spawned various follow-ons over the years with theories or methods from other scientific areas adapted to hunting lions.

The paper and later work is published in Lion Hunting and Other Mathematical Pursuits : A Collection of Mathematics, Verse, and Stories by the Late Ralph P. Boas, Jr, ISBN 0-88385-323-X. Various online collections of the lion hunting methods exist too.

Pondiczery

E. S. Pondiczery was another pseudonym used by Boas (maybe with collaborators), this time for a serious paper on topology, Power problems in abstract spaces, Duke Mathematical Journal, 11 (1944), 835-837. This paper and the name became part of the Hewitt-Marczewski-Pondiczery theorem.

The name, revealed in Lion Hunting and Other Mathematical Pursuits cited above, came from Pondicherry (a place in India disputed by the Dutch, English and French) and a slavic twist. The initials "E.S." were a plan to write a spoof on extra-sensory perception (ESP).

Other

Boas collaborated with Paul Erdős on a paper (The set on which an entire function is small, American Journal of Mathematics, 70, 400-402), giving him an Erdős number of 1.

His best-known books are the lion-hunting book previously mentioned and the monograph A Primer of Real Functions. The current edition of the primer has been revised and edited by his son, mathematician Harold P. Boas.

The best-known of his 13 doctoral students is Philip J. Davis, who is also his only advisee who did not graduate from Northwestern. Boas advised Davis, who was at Harvard University, while Boas was visiting at Brown University.

References

Further reading

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