John Williams Calkin

John Williams Calkin (11 October 1909, New Rochelle, New York – 5 August 1964, Westhampton, New York) was an American mathematician, specializing in functional analysis. The Calkin algebra is named after him.

Biography Calkin received his bachelor's degree from Columbia University in 1933 and his master's degree in 1934 and his Ph.D. in 1937 from Harvard University. His doctoral dissertation Applications of the Theory of Hilbert Space to Partial Differential Equations; the Self-Adjoint Transformations in Hilbert Space Associated with a Formal Partial Differential Operator of the Second Order and Elliptic Type ) was supervised by Marshall H. Stone. In the dissertation, Calkin acknowledges useful discussions with John von Neumann. At the Institute for Advanced Study, Calkin was a research assistant for the academic year 1937–1938 (working with Oswald Veblen and von Neumann) and in the first eight months of 1942.

During World War II Calkin was part of a mine warfare operations analysis group with J.L. Doob, J. von Neumann, and M.H. Stone. Von Neumann and Calkin worked on shock waves and damage by explosives; they were sent to England to learn of the progress under way there. When it appeared that their special knowledge would be useful for the Manhattan Project, they moved to Los Alamos. to the California Institute of Technology. He later taught at the Rice Institute (renamed Rice University in 1960), before returning in 1949 to Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory as a member of the theoretical division. Brant Calkin is an environmental activist in New Mexico and Utah and a former president of the Sierra Club.

Selected publications