Hassler Whitney

His maternal grandparents were astronomer and mathematician Simon Newcomb (1835-1909), a Steeves descendant, and Mary Hassler Newcomb, granddaughter of the first superintendent of the Coast Survey Ferdinand Rudolph Hassler.

His great uncle Josiah Whitney was the first to survey Mount Whitney.

Hassler Whitney (March 23, 1907 – May 10, 1989) was an American mathematician.

He was one of the founders of singularity theory, and did foundational work in manifolds, embeddings, immersions, characteristic classes, and geometric integration theory.

Hassler Whitney was born on March 23, 1907, in New York City, where his father, Edward Baldwin Whitney, was the First District New York Supreme Court judge.

His mother, A. Josepha Newcomb Whitney, was an artist and political activist.

He was the paternal nephew of Connecticut Governor and Chief Justice Simeon Eben Baldwin, his paternal grandfather was William Dwight Whitney, professor of Ancient Languages at Yale University, linguist and Sanskrit scholar.

Whitney was the great-grandson of Connecticut Governor and US Senator Roger Sherman Baldwin, and the great-great-grandson of American founding father Roger Sherman.

Whitney attended Yale University, where he received baccalaureate degrees in physics and in music, respectively in 1928 and in 1929.

As an undergraduate, with his cousin Bradley Gilman, Whitney made the first ascent of the Whitney–Gilman ridge on Cannon Mountain, New Hampshire in 1929.

It was the hardest and most famous rock climb in the East.

He was a member of the Swiss Alpine Society and the Yale Mountaineering Society (the precursor to the Yale Outdoors Club) and climbed most of the mountain peaks in Switzerland.

He married three times: his first wife was Margaret R. Howell, married on the 30 May 1930.

They had three children, James Newcomb, Carol and Marian.

At Harvard, Birkhoff also got him a job as Instructor of Mathematics for the years 1930–31, and an Assistant Professorship for the years 1934–35.

Whitney's earliest work, from 1930 to 1933, was on graph theory.

Many of his contributions were to the graph-coloring, and the ultimate computer-assisted solution to the four-color problem relied on some of his results.

Later on he held the following working positions: NRC Fellow, Mathematics, 1931–33; Assistant Professor, 1935–40; Associate Professor, 1940–46, Professor, 1946–52; Professor Instructor, Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton University, 1952–77; Professor Emeritus, 1977–89; Chairman of the Mathematics Panel, National Science Foundation, 1953–56; Exchange Professor, Collège de France, 1957; Memorial Committee, Support of Research in Mathematical Sciences, National Research Council, 1966–67; President, International Commission of Mathematical Instruction, 1979–82; Research Mathematician, National Defense Research Committee, 1943–45; Construction of the School of Mathematics.

Later, in 1932, he earned a PhD in mathematics at Harvard University.

His doctoral dissertation was The Coloring of Graphs, written under the supervision of George David Birkhoff.

His work in graph theory culminated in a 1933 paper, where he laid the foundations for matroids, a fundamental notion in modern combinatorics and representation theory independently introduced by him and Bartel Leendert van der Waerden in the mid 1930s.

Whitney and his first wife Margaret made an innovative decision in 1939 that influenced the history of modern architecture in New England, when they commissioned the architect Edwin B. Goodell, Jr. to design a new residence for their family in Weston, Massachusetts.

They purchased a rocky hillside site on a historic road, next door to another International Style house by Goodell from several years earlier, designed for Richard and Caroline Field.

Distinctively featuring flat roofs, flush wood siding, and corner windows—all of which were unusual architectural elements at the time—the Whitney House was also a creative response to its site, in that it placed the main living spaces one floor above ground level, with large banks of windows opening to the south sun and to views of the beautiful property.

The Whitney House survives today, along with the Field House, more than 75 years following its original construction; both are contributing structures in the historic Sudbury Road Area.

Throughout his life he pursued two particular hobbies with excitement: music and mountain-climbing.

An accomplished player of the violin and the viola, Whitney played with the Princeton Musical Amateurs.

He would run outside, 6 to 12 miles every other day.

He was a member of the National Academy of Sciences; Colloquium Lecturer, American Mathematical Society, 1946; Vice President, 1948–50 and Editor, American Journal of Mathematics, 1944–49; Editor, Mathematical Reviews, 1949–54; Chairman of the Committee vis.

lectureship, 1946–51; Committee Summer Instructor, 1953–54;, American Mathematical Society; American National Council Teachers of Mathematics, London Mathematical Society (Honorary), Swiss Mathematics Society (Honorary), Académie des Sciences de Paris (Foreign Associate); New York Academy of Sciences.

In 1947 he was elected member of the American Philosophical Society.

After his first divorce, on January 16, 1955 he married Mary Barnett Garfield.

He and Mary had two daughters, Sarah Newcomb (later a notable statistician, Sally Thurston), and Emily Baldwin.

In 1969 he was awarded the Lester R. Ford Award for the paper in two parts "The mathematics of Physical quantities" (#|1968a, #|1968b).

In 1976 he was awarded the National Medal of Science.

In 1980 he was elected honorary member of the London Mathematical Society.

In 1982, he received the Wolf Prize from the Wolf Foundation, and finally, in 1985, he was awarded the Steele Prize from the American Mathematical Society.

Finally, Whitney divorced his second wife and married Barbara Floyd Osterman on 8 February 1986.

Three years after his third marriage, on 10 May 1989, Whitney died in Princeton, after suffering a stroke.

In accordance with his wish, Hassler Whitney's ashes rest atop mountain Dents Blanches in Switzerland where Oscar Burlet, another mathematician and member of the Swiss Alpine Club, placed them on August 20, 1989.