Mathematician:Walter Rudin

Mathematician

Austrian-born American mathematician best known for the widely-used college textbooks he wrote.

Nationality

Austrian-American

History

• Born: 2 May 1921 in Vienna, Austria
• 1938: Fled to France to escape Anschluss
• 1940: Continued flight to Britain, served in British Army and Navy
• 1945: Moved to United States
• 1947: Earned B.A. from Duke University in North Carolina
• 1949: Earned Ph.D. from Duke University in North Carolina
• 1952: Began teaching at University of Rochester
• 1953: Married Mary Ellen Estill
• 1959: Joined University of Wisconsin-Madison as a professor
• 1991: Retired, and wrote his autobiography
• Died: 20 May 2010 in Madison, Wisconsin, USA

Theorems and Definitions

• Rudin-Shapiro Polynomial (with Harold Seymour Shapiro), also known as Shapiro Polynomial

• Golay-Rudin-Shapiro Sequence (with Marcel Jules Edouard Golay and Harold Seymour Shapiro)

Publications

• 1949: Uniqueness Theory for Laplace Series (PhD Thesis)

• 1950: Integral representation of continuous functions

• 1953: Principles of Mathematical Analysis (affectionately known as Baby Rudin)
  • 1964: Principles of Mathematical Analysis, 2nd ed.

• 1962: Fourier Analysis on Groups

• 1966: Real and Complex Analysis (affectionately known as Big Rudin)

• 1973: Functional Analysis
  • 1991: Functional Analysis, 2nd ed.

• 1969: Function Theory in Polydiscs

• 1980: Function Theory in the Unit Ball of $\C^n$

• 1991: The Way I Remember It (autobiography)

Sources

• John J. O'Connor and Edmund F. Robertson: "Walter Rudin": MacTutor History of Mathematics archive