Paul Halmos

Paul Halmos (1916 to 2006) was a Hungarian-born American mathematician and probabilist whose research ranged across mathematical logic, probability theory, operator theory, ergodic theory and functional analysis, with particular attention to Hilbert spaces. Born in the Kingdom of Hungary, he emigrated to the United States at the age of thirteen, studied at the University of Illinois and completed his doctorate there in 1938 under Joseph L. Doob. He then went to the Institute for Advanced Study, where he worked under John von Neumann and wrote Finite Dimensional Vector Spaces, and later taught at Chicago, Michigan, Indiana and Santa Clara. He devised polyadic algebras as an algebraic version of first-order logic, and he is remembered as an exceptionally clear expositor, honoured with the Lester R. Ford Award and the Steele Prize for exposition. His memoir I Want to Be a Mathematician describes academic life in twentieth century America.