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Jesse Douglas was born in New York City in 1897 and received all of his education there: Bachelor’s degree from City College where he was the youngest winner of the Belden Prize in mathematics as a freshman, and a PhD from Columbia University in 1920. Douglas achieved distinction for his positive solution of the so called Plateau problem, posed more than 150 years earlier, which asked whether an area minimizing surface exists within any contour. In 1936 he was awarded the Fields Medal, mathematics’ highest distinction, for this accomplishment. Douglas also made significant contribution to group theory, a branch of modern algebra. He taught at Brooklyn College and Columbia during the 1940s and early 1950s, and then spent the remainder of his career at City College. Douglas died in 1965.
Jesse Douglas (1897 - 1965)
Plateau Problem
Frank Harary (1921 - 2005)
Signed Graphs and Psychology
Frank Harary was Professor of Mathematics at the University of Michigan Ann Arbor and at New Mexico State University, where he later became Professor of Computer Science. He was born in 1921 in New York City into a family of Jewish immigrants from North Africa and the Middle East. After earning Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees in mathematics at Brooklyn College, Harary earned the doctorate at UC Berkeley and then began his career at U. Mich. Harary revitalized the mathematical area known as graph theory, whose origins date to the work of Leonhard Euler in 1700s. An extremely prolific and much cited researcher, Harary supervised 17 PhD students who collectively went on to supervise 96 more. He died in Las Cruces, NM in 2005.