Hassler Whitney (March 23, 1907 – May 10, 1989) was an American mathematician. He was one of the founders of singularity theory, and did foundational work in manifolds, embeddings, immersions, characteristic classes and, geometric integration theory.
Biography
Life Hassler Whitney was born on March 23, 1907, in New York City, where his father, Edward Baldwin Whitney, was the First District New York Supreme Court judge. His mother, A. Josepha Newcomb Whitney, was an artist and political activist. He was the paternal nephew of Connecticut Governor and Chief Justice Simeon E. Baldwin, his paternal grandfather was William Dwight Whitney, professor of Ancient Languages at Yale University, linguist and Sanskrit scholar. Whitney was the great-grandson of Connecticut Governor and US Senator Roger Sherman Baldwin, and the great-great-grandson of American founding father Roger Sherman. His maternal grandparents were astronomer and mathematician Simon Newcomb (1835–1909), a Steeves descendant, and Mary Hassler Newcomb, granddaughter of the first superintendent of the Coast Survey Ferdinand Rudolph Hassler. His great uncle Josiah Whitney was the first to survey Mount Whitney. He married three times: his first wife was Margaret R. Howell, married on the 30 May 1930. They had three children, James Newcomb, Carol and Marian. After his first divorce, on January 16, 1955, he married Mary Barnett Garfield. He and Mary had two daughters, Sarah Newcomb (later a notable statistician, Sally Thurston), and Emily Baldwin. Finally, Whitney divorced his second wife and married Barbara Floyd Osterman on 8 February 1986. Whitney and his first wife Margaret made an innovative decision in 1939 that influenced the history of modern architecture in New England, when they commissioned the architect Edwin B. Goodell, Jr. to design a new residence for their family in Weston, Massachusetts. They purchased a rocky hillside site on a historic road, next door to another International Style house by Goodell from several years earlier, designed for Richard and Caroline Field.
Throughout his life he pursued two particular hobbies with excitement: music and mountain-climbing. An accomplished player of the violin and the viola, Whitney played with the Princeton Musical Amateurs. He would run outside, 6 to 12 miles every other day. As an undergraduate, with his cousin Bradley Gilman, Whitney made the first ascent of the Whitney–Gilman ridge on Cannon Mountain, New Hampshire in 1929. It was the hardest and most famous rock climb in the East. He was a member of the Swiss Alpine Society and the Yale Mountaineering Society (the precursor to the Yale Outdoors Club) and climbed most of the mountain peaks in Switzerland.
Death Three years after his third marriage, on 10 May 1989, Whitney died in Princeton, after suffering a stroke. In accordance with his wish, Hassler Whitney's ashes rest atop mountain Dent Blanche in Switzerland where Oscar Burlet, another mathematician and member of the Swiss Alpine Club, placed them on August 20, 1989.
Academic career Whitney attended Yale University, where he received baccalaureate degrees in physics and in music, respectively in 1928 and in 1929. Later, in 1932, he earned a PhD in mathematics at Harvard University. His doctoral dissertation was The Coloring of Graphs, written under the supervision of George David Birkhoff. At Harvard, Birkhoff also got him a job as instructor of Mathematics for the years 1930–31, and an Assistant Professorship for the years 1934–35. Later on he held the following working positions: NRC Fellow, Mathematics, 1931–33; Assistant Professor, 1935–40; Associate Professor, 1940–46, Professor, 1946–52; Professor Instructor, Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton University, 1952–77; professor emeritus, 1977–89; Chairman of the Mathematics Panel, National Science Foundation, 1953–56; Exchange Professor, Collège de France, 1957; Memorial Committee, Support of Research in Mathematical Sciences, National Research Council, 1966–67; President, International Commission of Mathematical Instruction, 1979–82; Research Mathematician, National Defense Research Committee, 1943–45; Construction of the School of Mathematics. He was a member of the National Academy of Sciences; Colloquium Lecturer, American Mathematical Society, 1946; Vice President, 1948–50 and Editor, American Journal of Mathematics, 1944–49; Editor, Mathematical Reviews, 1949–54; Chairman of the Committee vis. lectureship, 1946–51; Committee Summer Instructor, 1953–54;, American Mathematical Society; American National Council Teachers of Mathematics, London Mathematical Society (Honorary), Swiss Mathematics Society (Honorary), Académie des Sciences de Paris (Foreign Associate); New York Academy of Sciences.
Honors In 1947 he was elected member of the American Philosophical Society. In 1969 he was awarded the Lester R. Ford Award for the paper in two parts "The mathematics of Physical quantities" (1968a, 1968b). In 1976 he was awarded the National Medal of Science. In 1980 he was elected honorary member of the London Mathematical Society. In 1982, he received the Wolf Prize from the Wolf Foundation, and finally, in 1985, he was awarded the Steele Prize from the American Mathematical Society.
Work
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