Leonard Mascot Blumenthal (February 27, 1901 – August 1984) was a Jewish

American American(s) may refer to: * American, something of, from, or related to the United States of America, commonly known as the "United States" or "America" ** Americans, citizens and nationals of the United States of America ** American ancestry, pe ...

mathematician A mathematician is someone who uses an extensive knowledge of mathematics in their work, typically to solve mathematical problems. Mathematicians are concerned with numbers, data, quantity, structure, space, models, and change. History On ...

. He received his

Ph.D. A Doctor of Philosophy (PhD, Ph.D., or DPhil; Latin: or ') is the most common degree at the highest academic level awarded following a course of study. PhDs are awarded for programs across the whole breadth of academic fields. Because it is a ...

in 1927 from

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 ...

, under the supervision of

Frank Morley Frank Morley (September 9, 1860 – October 17, 1937) was a leading mathematician, known mostly for his teaching and research in the fields of algebra and geometry. Among his mathematical accomplishments was the discovery and proof of the celebr ...

; his dissertation was titled ''Lagrange Resolvents in Euclidean Geometry''. He taught for the majority of his professional career at the

University of Missouri The University of Missouri (Mizzou, MU, or Missouri) is a public university, public Land-grant university, land-grant research university in Columbia, Missouri. It is Missouri's largest university and the flagship of the four-campus Universit ...

and was the author of ''A Modern View of Geometry''. He was a visiting scholar at the

Institute for Advanced Study The Institute for Advanced Study (IAS), located in Princeton, New Jersey, in the United States, is an independent center for theoretical research and intellectual inquiry. It has served as the academic home of internationally preeminent scholar ...

from 1933 to 1936. According to the

Mathematics Genealogy Project The Mathematics Genealogy Project (MGP) is a web-based database for the academic genealogy of mathematicians.. By 31 December 2021, it contained information on 274,575 mathematical scientists who contributed to research-level mathematics. For a ty ...

, he had 18 Ph.D. students at Missouri, among them

Leroy Milton Kelly Leroy Milton Kelly (May 8, 1914 – February 21, 2002Death-Record
for Leroy ...

and

William Arthur Kirk William Arthur ("Art") Kirk was an American mathematician. His research interests include nonlinear functional analysis, the geometry of Banach spaces and metric spaces. In particular, he has made notable contributions to the fixed point theory of ...

; he is the academic ancestor of over 80 mathematicians.. The Leonard M. Blumenthal Distinguished Professorship in Mathematics at the University of Missouri was established in 1992 in honor of Blumenthal. This

endowed chair A financial endowment is a legal structure for managing, and in many cases indefinitely perpetuating, a pool of financial, real estate, or other investments for a specific purpose according to the will of its founders and donors. Endowments are of ...

is given on a five-year rotating basis to Missouri mathematics professors; the Blumenthal Professors at Missouri have included John Beem, Mark Ashbaugh, Alex Koldobsky, and Zhenbo Qin.Leonard M. Blumenthal Distinguished Professorship in Mathematics
,

Department of Mathematics.

References

Works

* Blumenthal L.M. ''Theory and applications of

distance geometry Distance geometry is the branch of mathematics concerned with characterizing and studying sets of points based ''only'' on given values of the distances between pairs of points. More abstractly, it is the study of semimetric spaces and the isome ...

'' (1953), Oxford: At the Clarendon Press (Geoffrey Cumberlege), XI, 347 p. * Blumenthal L.M. ''Theory and applications of distance geometry'', (2nd edition, 1970), Bronx, New York: Chelsea Publishing Company. XI, 347 p., * Blumenthal L.M. ''A Modern View of Geometry'' (1961), W. H. Freeman & Co.; Dover edition (1980)

External links

* 1901 births 1984 deaths 20th-century American mathematicians Johns Hopkins University alumni University of Missouri faculty Institute for Advanced Study visiting scholars Mathematicians from Missouri {{US-mathematician-stub