Arthur Everett Pitcher

Arthur Everett Pitcher (known as "Everett Pitcher"; 18 July 1912, Hanover, New Hampshire – 4 December 2006) was an American mathematician, known for early pioneering work on exact sequences[1][2] and applying Morse theory to homotopy theory.[3]

Biography

Everett Pitcher grew up in Cleveland, where his father, Arthur Dunn Pitcher, headed the mathematics department at Adelbert College of Western Reserve University until he died of heart failure in 1924 at the age of 43. Everett Pitcher's mother was a math teacher, and his father received a Ph.D. in mathematics from the University of Chicago under E. H. Moore. Everett Pitcher received in 1932 an A.B. from Western Reserve University, in 1933 an M.A., and in 1935 a Ph.D. from Harvard University under Marston Morse with the thesis Certain Invariants of Closed Extremals.[4]

After two years as a Benjamin Peirce Instructor at Harvard, Pitcher joined the mathematics faculty of Lehigh University in 1938, where he remained except for a leave of absence serving in the U. S. Army during World War II and for some sabbaticals.[5] At Lehigh he served as chair of the department from 1960 until his retirement in 1978. He was a Guggenheim Fellow for the academic year 1952–1953. Everett gave an Invited Address to the American Mathematical Society in 1955, published as "Inequalities of critical point theory".[6]

Pitcher was one of the founders of the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics and a member of its Board of Trustees from 1961 to 1963. He was an AMS Associate Secretary from 1959 to 1966 and then Secretary of the AMS from 1966 to 1988.

Legacy

In 1936 Everett married Sarah Mathiott Hindman; the marriage produced two daughters, Susan Pitcher and Joan Pitcher Morrison. After Sarah Everett died in 1972, Everett in 1973 married Theresa Sell, who died in 2001. Everett Pitcher and his second wife Theresa endowed the Everett Pitcher Fund for the Propagation of Mathematics, which enables Lehigh to annually host the annual Pitcher Lecture series given by an eminent mathematician. In honor of Pitcher, Lehigh established the Pitcher Chair in Mathematics and the Pitcher Research Scholars in Mathematics.

In 1985 the Mathematical Association of America gave Everett Pitcher the Award for Distinguished Service. He described his work for the AMS in his reminiscences "Off the Record".[7]

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References
  1. According to Steven H. Weintraub in his memorial tribute to Everett Pitcher in the Notices of the AMS, the paper, by A. Everett Pitcher and John L. Kelley, Exact homomorphism sequences in homology theory "marks the first appearance in print of the term "exact sequence", now ubiquitous in algebraic topology. (This term had been invented by Eilenberg and Steenrod and was to appear in their book Foundations of Algebraic Topology, which was first published in 1952.)"
  2. Kelley, J. L.; Pitcher, Everett (1947). "Exact homomorphism sequences in homology theory". Ann. Math. 48 (3): 682–709. doi:10.2307/1969135. JSTOR 1969135.
  3. Steven H. Weintraub (November 2007). "A. Everett Pitcher (1912–2006)" (PDF). Notices of the AMS. 54 (10): 1331–1332.
  4. A. Everett Pitcher at the Mathematics Genealogy Project
  5. Pitcher, Arthur E., Institute for Advanced Study
  6. Pitcher, A. Everett (1958). "Inequalities of critical point theory". Bull. Amer. Math. Soc. 64: 1–30. doi:10.1090/s0002-9904-1958-10137-8. MR 0096153.
  7. Peter Duren, ed. (1989). A. Everett Pitcher's "Off the Record" in A Century of Mathematics in America. Part III. Amer. Math. Soc.
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