History: Richard Arens

["Mike Grissom" <mpg1@coastside.net>]

radsafe'rs (a bit late, but an important contributor
to the mathematical foundations of high-energy physics),

The following obituary was in the 5/20/00 San Jose
Mercury News:

----------
Richard Arens, UCLA math professor

New York Times

Richard Friederich Arens, a mathematician steeped in
abstruse theories and abstractions, died on May 3 [2000]
at a Los Angeles hospital. He was 81 and a resident of
Los Angeles.

The cause was a stroke, said officials at the University
of California-Los Angeles [UCLA], where Mr. Arens worked
for 42 years.

Mr. Arens' reputation rested on his ability to simplify
even the most complicated mathematical problems. This
made him a leading light in the rarefied strata of functional
analysis, function algebras, field theories and quantization.

He helped found the theories of functional analysis, which
observes infinite dimensional spaces; and Banach algebras,
named after the Polish mathematician Stefan Banach, which
concern the multiplication of continuous sets of numbers.

In the 1940s and 1950s, he contributed to a theorem allowing
mathematicians to classify the infinite dimensional spaces
that arise in the study of high-energy particles.

Another theorem he helped to establish shows that analytic
functions of several variables can be applied in the general
setting of Banach algebras.

In the 1960s, Mr. Arens shifted his focus to the mathematical
foundations of physics.

A native of Iserlohn, Germany, he came to the United States
at age 6. He graduated from UCLA in 1941 and received a
doctorate in mathematics at Harvard in 1945. He returned to
UCLA in 1947 after two years at the Institute for Advanced
Study in Princeton, N.J. He retired as an emeritus professor
in 1989 but continued to research and write.

----------
S.,

MikeG.
mikeg@slac.stanford.edu
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