Robert Megginson

Robert Eugene Megginson is an American mathematician, the Arthur F. Thurnau Professor of Mathematics at the University of Michigan. His research concerns functional analysis and Banach spaces;

Megginson was born in 1948 in Washington, Illinois, of Oglala Sioux heritage on his mother's side, He earned a degree in physics from the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign in 1969, and became a software specialist for the Roper Corporation until 1977, when he returned to graduate school. He earned a master's degree in statistics in 1983, He completed his Ph.D. in 1984 at the University of Illinois, with a thesis on normed vector spaces supervised by Mahlon Marsh Day. This accomplishment made him one of only approximately 12 Native Americans to hold a doctorate in mathematics, and he has taken great interest in underrepresented minorities in mathematics. The American Indian Science and Engineering Society gave him their Ely S. Parker Award for lifetime service to the Native American community in 1999. and in the same year the Mathematical Association of America gave him their Yueh-Gin Gung and Dr. Charles Y. Hu Award for Distinguished Service, for his work on underrepresented minorities. In 2012, Megginson became one of the inaugural fellows of the American Mathematical Society.