Sheldon Jay Axler (born November 6, 1949,

Philadelphia Philadelphia, often called Philly, is the List of municipalities in Pennsylvania#Municipalities, largest city in the Commonwealth (U.S. state), Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, the List of United States cities by population, sixth-largest city i ...

) is an American mathematician and textbook author. He is a professor of mathematics and the Dean of the College of Science and Engineering at

San Francisco State University San Francisco State University (commonly referred to as San Francisco State, SF State and SFSU) is a public research university in San Francisco. As part of the 23-campus California State University system, the university offers 118 different ...

. He graduated from Miami Palmetto Senior High School in

Miami Miami ( ), officially the City of Miami, known as "the 305", "The Magic City", and "Gateway to the Americas", is a coastal metropolis and the county seat of Miami-Dade County in South Florida, United States. With a population of 442,241 at ...

Florida Florida is a state located in the Southeastern region of the United States. Florida is bordered to the west by the Gulf of Mexico, to the northwest by Alabama, to the north by Georgia, to the east by the Bahamas and Atlantic Ocean, and to ...

in 1967. He obtained his AB in mathematics with highest honors at

Princeton University Princeton University is a private research university in Princeton, New Jersey. Founded in 1746 in Elizabeth as the College of New Jersey, Princeton is the fourth-oldest institution of higher education in the United States and one of the ...

(1971) and his PhD in mathematics, under professor Donald Sarason, from the

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 ...

, with the dissertation "Subalgebras of

L^

" in 1975. As a postdoc, he was a

C. L. E. Moore instructor The job title of C. L. E. Moore instructor is given by the Math Department at Massachusetts Institute of Technology to recent math Ph.D.s hired for their promise in pure mathematics research. The instructors are expected to do both teaching and rese ...

at the

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 ...

. He taught for many years and became a full professor at Michigan State University. In 1997, Axler moved to

, where he became the chair of the Mathematics Department. Axler received the

Lester R. Ford Award Lester is an ancient Anglo-Saxon surname and given name. Notable people and characters with the name include: People Given name * Lester Bangs (1948–1982), American music critic * Lester W. Bentley (1908–1972), American artist from Wisc ...

for expository writing in 1996 from the Mathematical Association of America for a paper titled "Down with Determinants!" in which he shows how one can teach or learn linear algebra without the use of

determinant In mathematics, the determinant is a scalar value that is a function of the entries of a square matrix. It characterizes some properties of the matrix and the linear map represented by the matrix. In particular, the determinant is nonzero if a ...

s. Axler later wrote a textbook, ''Linear Algebra Done Right'' (3rd ed. 2015), to the same effect. In 2012, he became a fellow of the

American Mathematical Society The American Mathematical Society (AMS) is an association of professional mathematicians dedicated to the interests of mathematical research and scholarship, and serves the national and international community through its publications, meetings, ...

.List of Fellows of the American Mathematical Society
Retrieved November 3, 2012. He was an Associate Editor of the '' American Mathematical Monthly'' and the Editor-in-Chief of the

Mathematical Intelligencer ''The Mathematical Intelligencer'' is a mathematical journal published by Springer Verlag that aims at a conversational and scholarly tone, rather than the technical and specialist tone more common among academic journals. Volumes are released qua ...

Books

* ''Linear Algebra Done Right'', third edition, Undergraduate Texts in Mathematics, Springer, 2015 (twelfth printing, 2009). * (with John E. McCarthy, and Donald Sarason) editors. ''Holomorphic Spaces'',

Cambridge University Press Cambridge University Press is the university press of the University of Cambridge. Granted letters patent by King Henry VIII in 1534, it is the oldest university press in the world. It is also the King's Printer. Cambridge University Pre ...

1998. * (with Paul Bourdon, and Wade Ramey
''Harmonic Function Theory'', second edition

Graduate Texts in Mathematics Graduate Texts in Mathematics (GTM) (ISSN 0072-5285) is a series of graduate-level textbooks in mathematics published by Springer-Verlag. The books in this series, like the other Springer-Verlag mathematics series, are yellow books of a standard ...

, Springer, 2001. * ''Harmonic Function Theory software'', a Mathematica package for symbolic manipulation of

harmonic function In mathematics, mathematical physics and the theory of stochastic processes, a harmonic function is a twice continuously differentiable function f: U \to \mathbb R, where is an open subset of that satisfies Laplace's equation, that is, : \f ...

s, version 7.00, released 1 January 2009 (previous versions released in 1992, 1993, 1994, 1996, 1999, 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003, and 2008). * ''Precalculus: A Prelude to Calculus'', Wiley, 2009 (third printing, 2010). * (with

Peter Rosenthal Peter Michael Rosenthal (born June 1, 1941) is Canadian-American Professor Emeritus of Mathematics at the University of Toronto, an adjunct professor of Law at the University of Toronto, and a lawyer in private practice. Early life Rosenthal g ...

and Donald Sarason) editors
''A Glimpse at Hilbert Space Operators''

Birkhäuser Birkhäuser was a Swiss publisher founded in 1879 by Emil Birkhäuser. It was acquired by Springer Science+Business Media in 1985. Today it is an imprint used by two companies in unrelated fields: * Springer continues to publish science (particu ...

, 2010. * ''College Algebra'',

John Wiley & Sons John Wiley & Sons, Inc., commonly known as Wiley (), is an American multinational publishing company founded in 1807 that focuses on academic publishing and instructional materials. The company produces books, journals, and encyclopedias, ...

2011. * ''Algebra & Trigonometry'', John Wiley & Sons, January 2011. * ''Measure, Integration & Real Analysis'' (open access, updated 2020), Springer, November 2019.

References

External links

Axler's Home Page
*
College of Science & Engineering Newsletter
from San Francisco State University.
Senior Fellow Sheldon Axler
from

California Council on Science and Technology The California Council on Science and Technology (CCST) is an independent, not-for-profit 501(c)(3) organization designed to offer expert advice to the California state government and to recommend solutions to science and technology-related pol ...

.
Author profile
in the database

zbMATH zbMATH Open, formerly Zentralblatt MATH, is a major reviewing service providing reviews and abstracts for articles in pure and applied mathematics, produced by the Berlin office of FIZ Karlsruhe – Leibniz Institute for Information Infrastruct ...

{{DEFAULTSORT:Axler, Sheldon 20th-century American mathematicians 21st-century American mathematicians 1949 births Living people San Francisco State University faculty Fellows of the American Mathematical Society Princeton University alumni Place of birth missing (living people) UC Berkeley College of Letters and Science alumni People from Miami Michigan State University faculty Mathematicians from Philadelphia Massachusetts Institute of Technology School of Science faculty