Frederick Gehring

Frederick William Gehring (1925 to 2012) was an American mathematician who worked in complex analysis, above all on quasiconformal mappings. He studied electrical engineering and mathematics at the University of Michigan under the wartime Navy college programme, served briefly in the Navy, and took his doctorate at Cambridge in 1952 after beginning study under John Charles Burkill at Peterhouse. After three years as a Benjamin Peirce instructor at Harvard he joined the University of Michigan faculty in 1955 and stayed until retirement at seventy, supervising 29 doctoral students and chairing the department three times. His 1973 paper proved the result now known as Gehring lemma, a reverse Holder inequality that has been cited over 800 times. Honours include the Order of the White Rose of Finland, election to the National Academy of Sciences in 1989, the Onsager Medal in 1995 and the American Mathematical Society Steele Prize for Lifetime Achievement in 2006.