mathematics

Harold P. Boas

Harold P. Boas is a mathematics topic covered in the lgStudy science library. This page brings together a partial reference excerpt, illustrations, worked examples, real-world applications and a short study plan, so you can understand Harold P. Boas rather than just read about it. In short: Harold P. Boas (born June 26, 1954) is an American mathematician, professor emeritus of Texas A&M University, where he was Professor and Presidential Professor for Teaching Excellence in the department of mathematics.

Key takeaways

Harold P. Boas belongs to mathematics; place it in that map before memorising details.
Learn the definition first, then one example that makes the definition concrete.
Connect Harold P. Boas to a quantity you can measure, compute or draw — that is where exam questions come from.
Reproduce the core statement of Harold P. Boas from memory before moving on to harder problems.

Reference excerpt

Harold P. Boas (born June 26, 1954) is an American mathematician, professor emeritus of Texas A&M University, where he was Professor and Presidential Professor for Teaching Excellence in the department of mathematics.

Life Boas was born in Evanston, Illinois, United States. He is the youngest of three children of two noted mathematicians, Ralph P. Boas, Jr and Mary L. Boas.

Education He received his A.B. and S.M. degrees in applied mathematics from Harvard University in 1976 and his Ph.D. in mathematics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1980 under the direction of Norberto Kerzman.

Career Boas was a J. F. Ritt Assistant Professor at Columbia University (1980–1984) before moving to Texas A&M University as an assistant professor, where he advanced to the rank of associate professor in 1987 and full professor in 1992. He was given the university title of Presidential Professor for Teaching Excellence in 2012 and the System title of Regents Professor in 2014. He has held visiting positions at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute in Berkeley, California.

Mathematical works and service Boas has published over thirty papers twelve of which he coauthored with his colleague Emil J. Straube. Starting from late 80s until mid 90s, they had a spectacular progress in the study of global regularity of the Bergman projection and of the ∂-Neumann problem. In particular, they have proved the global regularity in the sense of preservation of Sobolev spaces on large class of pseudoconvex domains. Boas also provided a counterexample to the Lu Qi-Keng Conjecture which was raised by Lu Qi-Keng in 1966 and asked whether it was true for every bounded domain that the Bergman kernel function had no zeroes. He has also published more than 200 short reviews for zbMathOpen and more than 550 reviews for Mathematical Reviews over MathSciNet. Boas was part of Russian Translation Project of the American Mathematical Society and translated more than 84 Russian research articles in English as well as a book by Alexander M. Kytmanov from Russian into English. He has served as the editor of the Notices of the American Mathematical Society between 2011 and 2003, took part in editorial duties in several research journals.

Awards He was the winner of the 1995 Stefan Bergman Prize of the American Mathematical Society. In 2012, he became a fellow of the American Mathematical Society. Boas is also known for his excellence in teaching and expository works, including Reflections on the arbelos (for which he won the Chauvenet Prize in 2009). He has twice won the Lester R. Ford Award of the Mathematical Association of America in 2007 and 2017. He has revised and updated his father's books, such as the fourth edition of A Primer of Real Functions and the second edition of Invitation to Complex Analysis.

References

Worked examples

Example 1 — a first encounter with Harold P. Boas

Start with the simplest possible case. Write down what Harold P. Boas claims or describes in one sentence, then invent the smallest concrete situation in which that sentence is true. In mathematics, the smallest case is usually a single object, a single equation or a single measurement. Check that every symbol or term in your sentence has a meaning in that case.

Example 2 — changing one variable

Take the situation from Example 1 and change exactly one quantity: double it, halve it, or set it to zero. Predict what should happen to Harold P. Boas before you calculate. Comparing your prediction with the result is the fastest way to find out whether you understand the idea or only the words.

Example 3 — an exam-style question

Typical questions about Harold P. Boas ask you to (a) state it precisely, (b) apply it to given data, and (c) explain a limitation. Practise writing all three answers in under five minutes; the third part is what separates a full-mark answer from an average one.

Applications of Harold P. Boas

In research: Harold P. Boas appears in mathematics research whenever the underlying quantities have to be modelled precisely. Papers usually cite it as a starting assumption and then explore where it breaks down.
In technology and industry: Engineering practice reuses Harold P. Boas in design rules, simulations and safety margins. Knowing the idea lets you read a specification sheet and understand why the numbers look the way they do.
In the classroom: Harold P. Boas is common in secondary-school and first-year university syllabi. It links to neighbouring topics 1954 births, 20th-century American mathematicians, 21st-century American mathematicians, so understanding it makes those chapters shorter.
In everyday life: Look for Harold P. Boas outside the textbook — in sport, cooking, traffic, electronics or the sky above you. An example you found yourself is remembered far longer than one you were given.

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How to study Harold P. Boas in 20 minutes

Read the reference excerpt below once, without taking notes.
Close the page and write down what Harold P. Boas means in your own words.
Compare your version with the excerpt and mark what you missed.
Work through the three examples above with pen and paper.
Explain Harold P. Boas out loud to somebody else — or to Teacher Smith in the lgStudy chat.

Frequently asked questions

What is Harold P. Boas in simple terms?

Why does Harold P. Boas matter?

Because it connects several mathematics ideas at once: it gives you a definition you can apply, a quantity you can calculate, and a way to check whether a result is plausible.

How should I study Harold P. Boas?

Read the excerpt, restate it from memory, then work through the examples and applications listed on this page. The five-step study plan above takes about twenty minutes.

What does this page cover?

It gives you a compact reference excerpt plus original lgStudy explanations, examples, applications and study material on Harold P. Boas.