Ralph P. Boas, Jr.

Ralph Philip Boas Jr. (August 8, 1912 – July 25, 1992) was a mathematician, teacher, and journal editor. He wrote over 200 papers, mainly in the fields of real and complex analysis.

Biography He was born in Walla Walla, Washington, the son of an English professor at Whitman College, but moved frequently as a child; his younger sister, Marie Boas Hall, later to become a historian of science, was born in Springfield, Massachusetts, where his father had become a high school teacher. He was home-schooled until the age of eight, began his formal schooling in the sixth grade, and graduated from high school while still only 15.

After postdoctoral studies at Princeton University with Salomon Bochner, and then the University of Cambridge in England, he began a two-year instructorship at Duke University, where he met his future wife, Mary Layne, also a mathematics instructor at Duke. They were married in 1941, and when the United States entered World War II later that year, Boas moved to the Navy Pre-flight School in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. In 1942, he interviewed for a position in the Manhattan Project, at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, but ended up returning to Harvard to teach in a Navy instruction program there, while his wife taught at Tufts University. In 1950 he became Professor of Mathematics at Northwestern University, without ever previously having been an assistant or associate professor; his wife became a professor of physics at nearby DePaul University, due to the anti-nepotism rules then in place at Northwestern. He was also editor of the American Mathematical Monthly from 1976 to 1981.

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

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.