Wallie Abraham Hurwitz

Wallie Abraham Hurwitz (1886 to 1958) was an American mathematician who worked on analysis. Born on 18 February 1886 in Joplin, Missouri, he graduated from the University of Missouri, did graduate work at Harvard, and won a Sheldon Traveling Fellowship that took him to the University of Göttingen, where he earned his doctorate under David Hilbert in 1910. In 1912 he joined the mathematics faculty of Cornell University and stayed there until his death in Ithaca, New York in 1958. His doctoral students include R. H. Cameron and Florence M. Mears, and his papers treated integral equations, the Fredholm determinant and summability. He kept a private library of nearly three thousand books, many on cryptography, some of which the United States Navy borrowed early in the Second World War, and he left his estate to the University of Missouri, Harvard and Cornell.