James Michael Gardner Fell (4 December 1923, Vancouver – 16 December 2016,

Gladwyne, Pennsylvania Gladwyne is a suburban community in Lower Merion Township, Montgomery County, Pennsylvania, United States along the historic Philadelphia Main Line. In 2018, Gladwyne was ranked the sixth richest ZIP code (using 2015 IRS data) in the country in a ...

) was a Canadian-American mathematician, specializing in functional analysis and representation theory. He is known for Fell bundles (''i.e.'' Banach *-algebraic bundles). He was an accomplished linguist who knew Sanskrit, Icelandic, German, French, Russian, Greek, and Latin.

Biography

J. M. G. Fell's father was James Pemberton Fell, a colonel in the Canadian Army Corps of Engineers and a real estate developer who helped to lay out the streets of North Vancouver. J. M. G. Fell attended elementary school in Vancouver and then in 1935 went to England for secondary school at

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. In 1940 he returned to Canada and matriculated at the University of British Columbia, graduating there in 1943 at the age of 19. In 1951 he received his Ph.D. in mathematics from the University of California, Berkeley under

John L. Kelley John L. Kelley (December 6, 1916, Kansas – November 26, 1999, Berkeley, California) was an American mathematician at the University of California, Berkeley, who worked in general topology and functional analysis. Kelley's 1955 text, ''General ...

with thesis ''On L-spaces''. He was an assistant professor at California Institute of Technology from 1953 to 1955, a research associate at the University of Chicago from 1955 to 1956, and an assistant professor, then associate professor, and then full professor at the University of Washington from 1956 to 1965. He was a full professor from 1965 to 1991 at the University of Pennsylvania, where he retired as professor emeritus. On 4 July 1957 Fell married Angela Daphne Rachel MacDonald. He was an Invited Speaker at the ICM in 1970 in Nice. He gave a mathematical lecture at the University of Iceland, and in 2000 the University gave him an honorary doctorate in theology. Upon his death he was survived by his wife, two children, and a grandson.

Fell bundles

Selected publications

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References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Fell, James Michael Gardner 1923 births 2016 deaths 20th-century Canadian mathematicians 20th-century American mathematicians University of British Columbia alumni University of California, Berkeley alumni University of Washington faculty University of Pennsylvania faculty Canadian emigrants to the United States