Johan "John" Arndt Eiesland (27 January 1867, Ny-Hellesund, Norway – 11 March 1950,

Morgantown, West Virginia Morgantown is a city in and the county seat of Monongalia County, West Virginia, Monongalia County, West Virginia, United States, situated along the Monongahela River. The largest city in North-Central West Virginia, Morgantown is best known as th ...

) was a Norwegian-American mathematician, specializing in differential geometry. Eiesland immigrated to the US in 1888 after completing his secondary education in

Christiansand Kristiansand is a seaside resort city and municipality in Agder county, Norway. The city is the fifth-largest and the municipality the sixth-largest in Norway, with a population of around 112,000 as of January 2020, following the incorporation ...

. He received his bachelor's degree from the University of South Dakota in 1891. He was a mathematics professor from 1895 to 1903 at

Thiel College Thiel College (, ) is a private college in Greenville, Pennsylvania. It is affiliated with the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America and is one of the smallest colleges or universities in the region with about 100 full-time and part time faculty ...

in Pennsylvania. On a leave of absence, he studied mathematics as a Johns Hopkins Scholar (1897–1898) at

Johns Hopkins University Johns Hopkins University (Johns Hopkins, Hopkins, or JHU) is a private university, private research university in Baltimore, Maryland. Founded in 1876, Johns Hopkins is the oldest research university in the United States and in the western hem ...

, where he received his Ph.D. in 1898. From 1903 to 1907 he was a mathematics instructor at the

United States Naval Academy The United States Naval Academy (US Naval Academy, USNA, or Navy) is a federal service academy in Annapolis, Maryland. It was established on 10 October 1845 during the tenure of George Bancroft as Secretary of the Navy. The Naval Academy ...

. In 1907 he became a professor of mathematics at

West Virginia University West Virginia University (WVU) is a public land-grant research university with its main campus in Morgantown, West Virginia. Its other campuses are those of the West Virginia University Institute of Technology in Beckley, Potomac State College ...

and the chair of the mathematics department from 1907 to 1938, when he retired as professor emeritus. Eiesland was elected a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Sciences in 1903. He was an Invited Speaker of the ICM in 1924 in Toronto. He married in 1904. At West Virginia University, Eiesland Hall is named in his honor, and in 1994 his heirs established the John Arndt Eiesland Visiting Professorship of Mathematics.

Selected publications

On Nullsystems in space of five dimensions and their relation to ordinary space.
American Journal of Mathematics 26, no. 2 (1904): 103–148. *On a certain system of conjugate lines on a surface connected with Euler's transformation. Trans. Amer. Math. Soc. 6 (1905) 450–471.
On a certain class of algebraic translation-surfaces.
American Journal of Mathematics 29, no. 4 (1907): 363–386.
On Translation-Surfaces Connected with a Unicursal Quartic.
American Journal of Mathematics 30, no. 2 (1908): 170–208. *On minimal lines and congruences in four-dimensional space. Trans. Amer. Math. Soc. 12 (1911) 403–428. *The group of motions of an Einstein space. Trans. Amer. Math. Soc. 27 (1925), 213–245. *The ruled V⁴₄ in S₅ associated with a Schläfli hexad. Trans. Amer. Math. Soc. 36 (1934) 315–326.

References

External links

John Arndt Eiesland, photo, gettyimages.com
{{DEFAULTSORT:Eiesland, John Arndt 1867 births 1950 deaths 19th-century American mathematicians 20th-century American mathematicians West Virginia University faculty Johns Hopkins University alumni Fellows of the American Association for the Advancement of Science Norwegian emigrants to the United States