Henry Seely White

Henry Seely White (1861-1943) was an American mathematician who worked on invariant theory, the geometry of curves and surfaces, algebraic curves and twisted curves. Born in Cazenovia, New York, he studied at Wesleyan University and took his doctorate at the University of Göttingen in 1891 under Felix Klein. He taught at Clark University, then at Northwestern University, and from 1905 until he retired in 1936 at Vassar College. In 1893 he helped organise the Mathematical Congress of the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago and invited Klein to give the Evanston Colloquium lectures, and his proposal led the American Mathematical Society to start its Colloquium lectures. He was president of the Society in 1907 and 1908, edited the Annals of Mathematics and the Transactions of the American Mathematical Society, and was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1915.