James Eells: Difference between revisions

James Eells (25 October 1926, Cleveland – 14 February 2007, Cambridge) was an American mathematician, who specialized in mathematical analysis.

Eells studied mathematics at Bowdoin College in Maine and earned his undergraduate degree in 1947. After graduation he spent one year teaching mathematics at Robert College in Istanbul and from 1948 was an instructor at Amherst College in Amherst. Next he undertook graduate study at Harvard, where in 1954 he received his PhD under Hassler Whitney with thesis Geometric Aspects of Integration Theory. In the academic year 1955-1956 he was at the Institute for Advanced Study (and subsequently in1962-1963, 1972-1973 and 1977). He taught at Columbia University, where he became a full professor in 1964. In 1963 and in 1966-1967 he was in Cambridge and after a visit to the mathematics department developed by Erik Christopher Zeeman at the University of Warwick Eells became a professor of mathematical analysis there in 1969. Eells organized many of the University of Warwick Symposia in mathemacs. In 1986 he became the first director of the mathematics section of the Abdus Salam International Centre for Theoretical Physics in Trieste. In 1992 he retired and lived in Cambridge.

Eells did research on global analysis, especially global harmonic analysis on Riemannian manifolds, which are important in the theory of minimal surfaces and theoretical physics.

In 1970 he was an invited speaker at the International Mathematical Congress in Nice (On Fredholm manifolds with K. D. Elworthy).

He was co-editor of the collected works of Hassler Whitney. Eells's doctoral students include Peter Stepan. Eells was married since 1950 and had a son and three daughters.

• "A setting for global analysis". Bulletin AMS. 72 (5): 751–807. 1966. {{cite journal}}: Text "http://www.ams.org/bull/1966-72-05/S0002-9904-1966-11558-6/" ignored (help)
• with J. H. Sampson: "Harmonic Mappings of Riemannian Manifolds". American Journal of Mathematics. 86: 109–160. 1964.
• with Luc Lemaire: "A report on harmonic maps". Bulletin London Mathematical Society. 10: 1–68. 1978. with a subsequent report published on Harmonic Maps (See Two reports on harmonic maps, World Scientific 1992, 1994
• with Luc Lemaire: Selected topics in harmonic maps, AMS 1983
• with Andrea Ratto: Harmonic maps and minimal immersions with symmetries – methods of ordinary differential equations applied to elliptic variational problems, Princeton University Press 1993
• with B. Fuglede: Harmonic maps between Riemannian polyhedra, Cambridge University Press 2001
• Singularities of smooth maps, London, Nelson 1967

• O'Connor, John J.; Robertson, Edmund F., "James Eells", MacTutor History of Mathematics Archive, University of St Andrews
• James Eells at the Mathematics Genealogy Project

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