James Allister Jenkins

James Allister Jenkins (born 23 September 1923, Toronto, Ontario;[1] – 16 September 2012, Lock Haven, Pennsylvania) was a Canadian–American mathematician, specializing in complex analysis.

Education and career

Jenkins moved from Toronto to the United States to attend graduate school in mathematics at Harvard University.[2] There he received his PhD in 1948 with thesis Some Problems in Complex Analysis under the supervision Lars Ahlfors, one of the first two Fields laureates.[3] After some time at Harvard as a postdoc, Jenkins taught and did research at Johns Hopkins University for several years. He became, by 1955, a professor at the University of Notre Dame and, by 1963, a professor at Washington University in St. Louis, where he eventually retired as professor emeritus. He spent several sabbaticals at the Institute for Advanced Study.[4]

Jenkins was the author or coauthor of over 137 research publications in complex analysis.[5] He coauthored 6 papers with Marston Morse.[6][7][8][9][10][11]

In their 1953 paper in Fundamenta Mathematicae, "Morse and Jenkins solve the difficult problem of showing that on a simply connected Riemann surface every pseudo-harmonic function has a pseudo-conjugate. Thus in particular they show that on such a surface any pseudo-harmonic function can be made harmonic by a change of the conformai structure."[12]

Recall here that pseudo-harmonic means "harmonic after a suitable homeomorphism" so that the topological properties of harmonic functions automatically carry over to pseudo-harmonic ones. In this context V is a pseudo-conjugate to U if there is a homeomorphism of the domain of these functions such that (U + iV) is analytic. The work of Morse and Jenkins extending over the early fifties is devoted to exploring the "order" in the "complexity" mentioned in their "Fundamenta" paper.[12]

Morse and Jenkins basically settled "the simply connected case, where they extended and completed earlier work of Kaplan, Boothby[13] and others ..."[12] and then in their 1953 paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences they discussed the same problems on doubly connected surfaces. "In particular they there give a very complete analysis of the structure of the level sets of a pseudo-harmonic function."[12]

In 1962 Jenkins was an Invited Speaker at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Stockholm.[14]

Selected publications

Articles

Books

References
  1. "James A. Jenkins (1923–2012)". Journal of Mathematical Sciences. 200 (5): 519–520. 2014. doi:10.1007/s10958-014-1940-x. S2CID 189872702. Journal of Mathematical Sciences (August 2014, Volume 200, S. 519–520)
  2. "Obituary. Dr. James A. Jenkins". St. Louis Post-Dispatch. September 20, 2012.
  3. James Allister Jenkins at the Mathematics Genealogy Project
  4. "James A. Jenkins". Scholars, Institute for Advanced Study.
  5. "Jim Jenkins (1923–2012)". Washington University in St. Louis.
  6. Contour equivalent pseudoharmonic functions and pseudoconjugates, by M. Morse with J. Jenkins, Amer. J. Math. 74 (1952), 23-51 doi:10.2307/2372067
  7. Topological methods on Riemann surfaces. Pseudoharmonic junctions, by M. Morse with J. Jenkins, Ann. of Math. Studies, no. 30, Princeton Univ. Press, Princeton, N. J., 1953, pp. 111-139
  8. The existence of pseudoconjugates on Riemann surfaces, by M. Morse with J. Jenkins, Fund. Math. 39 (1953), 269-287
  9. Conjugate nets, conformai structure, and interior transformations on open Riemann surfaces, by M. Morse with J. Jenkins, Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. 39 (1953), 1261-126 doi:10.1073/pnas.39.12.1261
  10. Conjugate nets on an open Riemann surface, by M. Morse with J. Jenkins, Proc. Univ. Michigan Conf., June 1953
  11. Curve families F* locally the level curves of a pseudoharmonic function, by M. Morse with J. Jenkins, Acta Math. 91 (1954), 42 pp. doi:10.1007/BF02393423
  12. Bott, Raoul (1980). "Marston Morse and his mathematical works". Bulletin of the American Mathematical Society. 3 (3): 907–951. doi:10.1090/S0273-0979-1980-14824-7. (See p. 938)
  13. "Obituary: William M. Boothby, professor emeritus of mathematics, 102". The Source, Washington University in St. Louis. April 29, 2021.
  14. Jenkins, James A. (1962). On normalization in the general coefficient theorem. Proceedings of the International Congress of Mathematicians Stockholm. Vol. 1. pp. 347–350.
This article is issued from Wikipedia. The text is licensed under Creative Commons - Attribution - Sharealike. Additional terms may apply for the media files.