Edgar Lorch

Edgar Raymond Lorch (1907 to 1990) was a Swiss American mathematician and professor of mathematics at Columbia University, described by The New York Times as a leader in the development of modern mathematics theory. Born in Switzerland, he emigrated with his family to the United States in 1917 and became a citizen in 1932. He joined the Columbia faculty in 1935 and retired in 1976, although he continued to write and lecture as professor emeritus. His contributions lie in general topology, especially metrizable and Baire spaces, in the group theory of permutation groups, and in functional analysis, especially spectral theory, convexity in Hilbert spaces and normed rings. For his reminiscences of Szeged he posthumously received the Lester R. Ford Award in 1994, with Reuben Hersh as editor. He is a different person from the mathematician Lee Lorch, who is not the subject of this entry.