Edward Burr Van Vleck

Edward Burr Van Vleck (1863 to 1943) was an American mathematician who worked on function theory, differential equations and continued fractions. Born in Middletown, Connecticut, the son of the Wesleyan University mathematician and astronomer John Monroe Van Vleck, he studied at Wesleyan and Johns Hopkins before taking his doctorate at Gottingen in 1893 under Felix Klein, with a thesis on continued fraction expansions of hyperelliptic and related integrals. He taught at Wisconsin and Wesleyan and then returned to the University of Wisconsin in 1906, where he stayed until he retired in 1929. His surviving output was small, about thirty papers, because he held that a result should be expressed with precision and elegance before it was published. He gave the American Mathematical Society Colloquium Lectures in 1903 on divergent series and continued fractions, edited its Transactions, and served as its president in 1913 and 1914. A later study credits him with an early zero-one law in probability. His son John Hasbrouck Van Vleck won the 1977 Nobel Prize in Physics.