Marston Morse

Harold Calvin Marston Morse, who lived from 24 March 1892 to 22 June 1977, was an American mathematician best known for his work on the calculus of variations in the large. In that subject he introduced the technique of differential topology now called Morse theory, which studies the topology of a smooth manifold through the differentiable functions defined on it. Born in Waterville, Maine, he took his bachelor's degree at Colby College in 1914 and his master's and doctorate at Harvard, where his 1917 thesis on geodesic motion on a surface of negative curvature was written under George David Birkhoff. He taught at Harvard, Cornell and Brown and from 1935 until his retirement in 1962 was at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1929, the National Academy of Sciences in 1932 and the American Philosophical Society in 1936, and won the Bocher Memorial Prize in 1933. The Morse-Palais lemma and the Thue-Morse sequence are named after him.