Clarence Raymond Adams

Clarence Raymond Adams (1898 to 1965) was an American mathematician who worked on partial difference equations. He entered Brown University in the fall of 1915 and graduated in 1918, then received his PhD in 1922 from Harvard University under the direction of G. D. Birkhoff. As a Sheldon Traveling Fellow of Harvard he studied at the Sapienza University of Rome under Tullio Levi-Civita and at the University of Göttingen under Richard Courant. In 1923 he returned to Brown University as an instructor, became a full professor in 1936 and chaired the mathematics department from 1942 to 1960. He married Rachel Blodgett on 17 August 1922, and she earned her own PhD from Radcliffe College. Adams retired in 1965 and died on 15 October of that year. He later served as thesis advisor to Anthony Morse, who took his Brown PhD in 1937 and went on to co-create Morse-Kelley set theory.