Charles W. Curtis

Charles W. Curtis is a mathematician and historian of mathematics, known for his work in finite group theory and representation theory. He is a retired professor of mathematics at the University of Oregon.

Research

Curtis introduced Curtis duality, a duality operation on the characters of a reductive group over a finite field. His book with Irving Reiner, (Curtis & Reiner 1962), was the standard text on representation theory for many years.

Biography

Curtis received a bachelor's degree from Bowdoin College in 1948,^[1] and his Ph.D. from Yale University in 1951, under the supervision of Nathan Jacobson.^[2] He taught at the University of Wisconsin–Madison from 1954 to 1963.^[3] Subsequently, he moved to the University of Oregon, where he is an emeritus professor.^[4]

While at Yale, on June 17, 1950 in Cheshire, Connecticut, Curtis married his wife Elizabeth, a kindergarten teacher and childcare provider. At the time of their 50th anniversary in 2000, they had three grandchildren.^[5]

Publications

• Curtis, Charles W. (1999), Pioneers of Representation Theory: Frobenius, Burnside, Schur, and Brauer, History of Mathematics, Providence, R.I.: American Mathematical Society, ISBN 978-0-8218-2677-5, http://books.google.com/books?isbn=0821826778 .^[6][7][8][9]
• Curtis, Charles W.; Reiner, Irving (1962), Representation theory of finite groups and associative algebras, Pure and Applied Mathematics, Vol. XI, Interscience Publishers, a division of John Wiley & Sons, New York-London, ISBN 978-0-8218-4066-5, MR0144979, http://books.google.com/books?id=RKwjeZKMr8oC 
• Curtis, Charles W.; Reiner, Irving (1981), Methods of representation theory. Vol. I, New York: John Wiley & Sons, ISBN 978-0-471-18994-7, MR632548 

References

1. ^ University of Oregon Catalog 2011–2012, retrieved 2011-07-11.
2. ^ Charles W. Curtis at the Mathematics Genealogy Project.
3. ^ UW Math Department Faculty 1849-2010, retrieved 2011-07-11.
4. ^ Emeritus Faculty Directory, University of Oregon Department of Mathematics, retrieved 2011-07-11.
5. ^ "Curtis", Eugene Register-Guardian, July 24, 2000, http://news.google.com/newspapers?id=O1dWAAAAIBAJ&sjid=8-sDAAAAIBAJ&pg=3766,6703564 .
6. ^ Review of Pioneers of Representation Theory by Peter G. Neumann, MR1715145.
7. ^ Review of Pioneers of Representation Theory] by J. E. Humphreys, Bull. AMS, 2000, doi:10.1090/S0273-0979-00-00867-3.
8. ^ Review of Pioneers of Representation Theory by Leo Corry, Isis, 2001.
9. ^ Review of Pioneers of Representation Theory by Thomas Hawkins, Historia Mathematica, 2003, doi:10.1016/S0315-0860(02)00012-5.

External links

• Pictures of C. W. Curtis from Oberwolfach