Elias Stein

Elias Menachem Stein was an American mathematician, born in Antwerp, Belgium, on 13 January 1931, who was a leading figure in the field of harmonic analysis. His family fled to the United States after the German invasion of 1940, and he earned a Ph.D. at the University of Chicago in 1955 under the direction of Antoni Zygmund before teaching at MIT and Chicago and becoming a full professor at Princeton in 1963, where he remained until his death in 2018. He extended and clarified Calderón-Zygmund theory, and his name is attached to Stein interpolation, the Stein maximal principle, the Tomas-Stein restriction theorem and the Fefferman-Stein theory of the Hardy space H1. His books on harmonic analysis are standard references, and he trained at least 52 graduate students, including Charles Fefferman and Terence Tao. His honors included the Wolf Prize in Mathematics in 1999 and the National Medal of Science in 2001.