John Robert Kline

John Robert Kline (1891 to 1955) was an American mathematician and educator who spent his career at the University of Pennsylvania. He was Professor of mathematics there from 1920 to 1955, chaired the Department of Mathematics from 1933 to 1954 and held the Thomas A. Scott Professorship of Mathematics from 1941 to 1955. He earned his doctorate as a student of Robert Lee Moore, received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1925 and was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 1941. His early papers, published between 1919 and 1927, concern curves in the plane, connected sets that a finite number of points disconnect, the division of the plane by continua and sums of infinitely many mutually exclusive continua. He supervised a notable group of doctoral students, among them Lida Barrett, Donald Flanders, Joseph Kusner, Arthur Milgram, Athanasios Papoulis, Dudley Woodard, Leo Zippin and William Claytor.