Douglas

Jesse Douglas

Born: 3 July 1897 in New York, USA
Died: 7 Oct 1965 in New York, USA

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Douglas developed a love of geometry studying Plateau Problems. He studied differential geometry at Columbia College from 1920 to 1926. Then from 1926 to 1930 he visited Princeton, Harvard, Chicago, Paris and Göttingen.

He gave a complete solution to the Plateau problem which was first posed by Lagrange in 1760. It was studied by Riemann, Weierstrass and Schwarz. The problem is proving the existence of a surface of minimal area bounded by a contour. Before Douglas's solution only special cases had been solved. Then he went on to study generalisations of the problem.

Douglas also worked on the calculus of variations and, in 1951, studied groups with 2 generators x,y such that every element can be expressed in the form x^ny^m, n,n integers.

References:

  1. Dictionary of Scientific Biography
  2. Boigraphy of Douglas, National Academy of Science (1972).
  3. T M Rassias (ed.), The Problem of Plateau - A tribute to Jesse Douglas and Tibor Radó (Singapore, 1992). 
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JOC/EFR February 1996