Ray Kunze

Ray Alden Kunze (March 7, 1928 – May 21, 2014) was an American mathematician who chaired the mathematics departments at the University of California, Irvine and the University of Georgia. He began his undergraduate studies at Denison University but transferred to the University of Chicago after two years, and earned bachelor's and master's degrees in mathematics. As well as his positions at UCI and Georgia, he also worked at the Institute for Advanced Study, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Brandeis University, and Washington University in St. Louis. With Kenneth M. Hoffman he was the author of Linear Algebra (Prentice-Hall, 1961; 2nd ed., Pearson, 1971).

In 1994, a special session on representation theory and harmonic analysis was held in honor of Kunze as part of the 889th meeting of the American Mathematical Society, and the papers from the session were published as a festschrift. In 2012, Kunze was recognized as one of the inaugural fellows of the American Mathematical Society.