Andrew Browder (January 8, 1931 – March 24, 2019) was an American mathematician at

Brown University Brown University is a private research university in Providence, Rhode Island. Brown is the seventh-oldest institution of higher education in the United States, founded in 1764 as the College in the English Colony of Rhode Island and Providenc ...

Early life and education

Andrew Browder was born in

Moscow Moscow ( , US chiefly ; rus, links=no, Москва, r=Moskva, p=mɐskˈva, a=Москва.ogg) is the capital and largest city of Russia. The city stands on the Moskva River in Central Russia, with a population estimated at 13.0 million ...

, Russia, where his father

Earl Browder Earl Russell Browder (May 20, 1891 – June 27, 1973) was an American politician, communist activist and leader of the Communist Party USA (CPUSA). Browder was the General Secretary of the CPUSA during the 1930s and first half of the 1940s. Duri ...

, an American communist from Kansas, United States, was living and working for a period. His mother was Raissa Berkmann, a Russian Jewish woman from St. Petersburg. His brothers were

Felix Browder Felix Earl Browder (; July 31, 1927 – December 10, 2016) was an American mathematician known for his work in nonlinear functional analysis. He received the National Medal of Science in 1999 and was President of the American Mathematical Society ...

, also born in Moscow, and William Browder. Andrew, Felix and William have careers in mathematics. Their father returned to the United States in the early 1930s, bringing his family with him. The senior Browder became head of the

Communist Party USA The Communist Party USA, officially the Communist Party of the United States of America (CPUSA), is a communist party in the United States which was established in 1919 after a split in the Socialist Party of America following the Russian Revo ...

. He ran for US president in 1936 and 1940. The analytic nature of the game of

chess Chess is a board game for two players, called White and Black, each controlling an army of chess pieces in their color, with the objective to checkmate the opponent's king. It is sometimes called international chess or Western chess to disti ...

enthralled Andrew early on: "My own main sport was always chess. My father taught me the game when I was six, a friend of the family gave me a chess book when I was eleven or twelve, and after that I was hooked."

Career

Andrew traces his interest in mathematics to 1955 when he was a private at

Fort Dix Fort Dix, the common name for the Army Support Activity (ASA) located at Joint Base McGuire-Dix-Lakehurst, is a United States Army post. It is located south-southeast of Trenton, New Jersey. Fort Dix is under the jurisdiction of the Air Force A ...

and

Eisenhower Dwight David "Ike" Eisenhower (born David Dwight Eisenhower; ; October 14, 1890 – March 28, 1969) was an American military officer and statesman who served as the 34th president of the United States from 1953 to 1961. During World War II, ...

offered early release to servicemen entering

graduate school Postgraduate or graduate education refers to Academic degree, academic or professional degrees, certificates, diplomas, or other qualifications pursued by higher education, post-secondary students who have earned an Undergraduate education, un ...

. He studied at

Massachusetts Institute of Technology The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a private land-grant research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Established in 1861, MIT has played a key role in the development of modern technology and science, and is one of the ...

. For two years he was a Miller Fellow at

University of California, Berkeley The University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley, Berkeley, Cal, or California) is a public land-grant research university in Berkeley, California. Established in 1868 as the University of California, it is the state's first land-grant u ...

and also studied at

Aarhus, Denmark Aarhus (, , ; officially spelled Århus from 1948 until 1 January 2011) is the second-largest city in Denmark and the seat of Aarhus municipality, Aarhus Municipality. It is located on the eastern shore of Jutland in the Kattegat sea and app ...

. As for teaching, "I taught well over one hundred courses, some of which I found interesting and enjoyable, some pretty depressing, most somewhere in between. The students had parallel experiences."

Personal life

Browder married and has as least one child: Laura Browder, professor of American Studies at the

University of Richmond The University of Richmond (UR or U of R) is a private liberal arts college in Richmond, Virginia. It is a primarily undergraduate, residential institution with approximately 4,350 undergraduate and graduate students in five schools: the School ...

Works

In 1969 Browder published ''Introduction to Function Algebras''. "The author develops much of the general theory of

function algebra In functional analysis, a Banach function algebra on a compact Hausdorff space ''X'' is unital subalgebra, ''A'', of the commutative C*-algebra ''C(X)'' of all continuous, complex-valued functions from ''X'', together with a norm on ''A'' that m ...

s and then applies it in the last two chapters to the theory of rational approximation in the plane, and to finding analytic structure in the spectrum of a

Dirichlet algebra In mathematics, a Dirichlet algebra is a particular type of algebra associated to a compact Hausdorff space ''X''. It is a closed subalgebra of ''C''(''X''), the uniform algebra of bounded continuous functions on ''X'', whose real parts are dense i ...

." In 1996 he published an upper-level

textbook A textbook is a book containing a comprehensive compilation of content in a branch of study with the intention of explaining it. Textbooks are produced to meet the needs of educators, usually at educational institutions. Schoolbooks are textboo ...

''Mathematical Analysis'' for well-motivated students having a background of

calculus Calculus, originally called infinitesimal calculus or "the calculus of infinitesimals", is the mathematical study of continuous change, in the same way that geometry is the study of shape, and algebra is the study of generalizations of arithm ...

and

linear algebra Linear algebra is the branch of mathematics concerning linear equations such as: :a_1x_1+\cdots +a_nx_n=b, linear maps such as: :(x_1, \ldots, x_n) \mapsto a_1x_1+\cdots +a_nx_n, and their representations in vector spaces and through matrices. ...

. Four topics are encompassed by the text: single-variable theory,

topology In mathematics, topology (from the Greek language, Greek words , and ) is concerned with the properties of a mathematical object, geometric object that are preserved under Continuous function, continuous Deformation theory, deformations, such ...

and

function space In mathematics, a function space is a set of functions between two fixed sets. Often, the domain and/or codomain will have additional structure which is inherited by the function space. For example, the set of functions from any set into a vect ...

measure theory In mathematics, the concept of a measure is a generalization and formalization of geometrical measures ( length, area, volume) and other common notions, such as mass and probability of events. These seemingly distinct concepts have many simil ...

and

Lebesgue integration In mathematics, the integral of a non-negative function of a single variable can be regarded, in the simplest case, as the area between the graph of that function and the -axis. The Lebesgue integral, named after French mathematician Henri Lebe ...

, and functions of several variables. In 2000 Browder published his article "Topology in the Complex Plane", which described the

Brouwer fixed point theorem Brouwer's fixed-point theorem is a fixed-point theorem in topology, named after L. E. J. (Bertus) Brouwer. It states that for any continuous function f mapping a compact convex set to itself there is a point x_0 such that f(x_0)=x_0. The simplest ...

, the

Jordan curve theorem In topology, the Jordan curve theorem asserts that every ''Jordan curve'' (a plane simple closed curve) divides the plane into an " interior" region bounded by the curve and an "exterior" region containing all of the nearby and far away exterior ...

, and

Alexander duality In mathematics, Alexander duality refers to a duality theory presaged by a result of 1915 by J. W. Alexander, and subsequently further developed, particularly by Pavel Alexandrov and Lev Pontryagin. It applies to the homology theory properties of ...

. With Hiroshi Yamaguchi, Browder wrote "A variation formula for harmonic modules and its application to several complex variables". Browder died March 24, 2019 in

Providence, Rhode Island Providence is the capital and most populous city of the U.S. state of Rhode Island. One of the oldest cities in New England, it was founded in 1636 by Roger Williams, a Reformed Baptist theologian and religious exile from the Massachusetts Bay ...

.In memoriam Andrew Browder
from Perry-McStay

References

* {{DEFAULTSORT:Browder, Andrew 20th-century American mathematicians 21st-century American mathematicians 1931 births 2019 deaths Mathematical analysts

Andrew Andrew is the English form of a given name common in many countries. In the 1990s, it was among the top ten most popular names given to boys in List of countries where English is an official language, English-speaking countries. "Andrew" is freq ...

American people of Russian-Jewish descent American textbook writers Massachusetts Institute of Technology alumni Brown University faculty