Clifford John Earle, Jr. (November 3, 1935 June 12, 2017) was an American mathematician who specialized in
complex variable
Complex analysis, traditionally known as the theory of functions of a complex variable, is the branch of mathematical analysis that investigates functions of complex numbers. It is helpful in many branches of mathematics, including algebraic ...
s and
Teichmüller spaces.
Biography
Earle was born in
Racine, Wisconsin
Racine ( ) is a city in and the county seat of Racine County, Wisconsin, United States. It is located on the shore of Lake Michigan at the mouth of the Root River. Racine is situated 22 miles (35 km) south of Milwaukee and approximately 60 ...
in 1935. He received his bachelor's degree from
Swarthmore College
Swarthmore College ( , ) is a Private college, private Liberal arts colleges in the United States, liberal arts college in Swarthmore, Pennsylvania. Founded in 1864, with its first classes held in 1869, Swarthmore is one of the earliest coeduca ...
in 1957, his master's degree from
Harvard University in 1958, and his
Ph.D. in 1962 under
Lars Ahlfors with thesis ''Teichmüller Spaces of Groups of the Second Kind''. From 1963 to 1965 he was at the
Institute for Advanced Study. In 1965 he became an assistant professor and in 1969 a full professor at
Cornell University. From 1976 to 1979 he was the chair of the mathematics department at Cornell.
Earle's research dealt with
Teichmüller spaces (i.e. moduli spaces of
Riemann surfaces) and the related theories of
quasiconformal mapping
In mathematical complex analysis, a quasiconformal mapping, introduced by and named by , is a homeomorphism between plane domains which to first order takes small circles to small ellipses of bounded eccentricity.
Intuitively, let ''f'' : ''D' ...
s (following Ahlfors and
Lipman Bers) and Kleinian groups.
With
James Eells in 1967 he mathematically described, for any compact Riemann surface X, the homotopy types of spaces of diffeomorphisms of X and thus a new characterization of the Teichmüller space of X. In 1969 Earle and Eells extended the 1967 result to non-orientable surfaces, and in 1970 Earle and Schatz extended the 1967 result to surfaces with boundary.
Earle was a
Guggenheim Fellow for the academic year 1974/75. In 2012 he was elected a Fellow of the
American Mathematical Society.
He was married in 1960 and had two children and two grandchildren. He died at a hospice in
Ithaca, New York on June 12, 2017.
Selected works
*
*
*
*
*
*with
Irwin Kra
Irwin Kra (born January 5, 1937) is an American mathematician, who works on the function (mathematics), function theory in complex analysis.
Life and work
Kra studied at Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn (bachelor's degree in 1960) and at Colu ...
, S. L. Krushkal´ ''Holomorphic motions and Teichmüller spaces'',
Transactions of the American Mathematical Society 343, 1994, pp. 927–948.
*with Kra ''On sections of some holomorphic families of closed Riemann surfaces'', Acta Mathematica 137, 1976, 49-79
*''On holomorphic families of pointed Riemann Surfaces'',
Bulletin of the American Mathematical Society, 79, 1973, pp. 163–166
*''The Teichmüller space of an arbitrary Fuchsian group'';
Bulletin of the American Mathematical Society, 70, 1964, 669-701
*with Frederick P. Gardiner ''Geometric isomorphisms between infinite dimensional Teichmüller spaces'', Transactions AMS, 348, 1996, pp. 1163–1190
Sources
*Y. Jiang, S. Mitra (eds.): Quasiconformal Mappings, Riemann Surfaces, and Teichmüller Spaces, AMS Special Session held in honor of Clifford Earle Jr., Syracuse 2010, Contemporary Mathematics, AMS 2012
References
External links
Clifford Earle's homepage, Cornell University
{{DEFAULTSORT:Earle, Clifford John
1935 births
2017 deaths
Swarthmore College alumni
Harvard University alumni
Cornell University faculty
Fellows of the American Mathematical Society
People from Racine, Wisconsin
Mathematicians from Wisconsin
Complex analysts
20th-century American mathematicians