Donald C. Spencer
Mathematician, Academic
1912 – 2001
Who was Donald C. Spencer?
Donald Clayton Spencer was an American mathematician, known for work on deformation theory of structures arising in differential geometry, and on several complex variables from the point of view of partial differential equations. He was born in Boulder, Colorado, and educated at the University of Colorado and MIT.
He wrote a Ph.D. in diophantine approximation under J. E. Littlewood and G.H. Hardy at the University of Cambridge, completed in 1939. He had positions at MIT and Stanford before his appointment in 1950 at Princeton University. There he was involved in a series of collaborative works with Kunihiko Kodaira on the deformation of complex structures, which had some influence on the theory of complex manifolds and algebraic geometry, and the conception of moduli spaces.
He also was led to formulate the d-bar Neumann problem, for the operator
in PDE theory, to extend Hodge theory and the n-dimensional Cauchy-Riemann equations to the non-compact case. This is used to show existence theorems for holomorphic functions.
He later worked on pseudogroups and their deformation theory, based on a fresh approach to overdetermined systems of PDEs.
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- Born
- Apr 25, 1912
Boulder - Also known as
- Donald Spencer
- Nationality
- United States of America
- Profession
- Education
- Massachusetts Institute of Technology
- University of Colorado Boulder
- University of Cambridge
- Lived in
- Boulder
- Died
- Dec 23, 2001
Scottsdale
Submitted
on July 23, 2013
Citation
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