Elias M. Stein

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Elias M. Stein
Elias Stein.jpeg
Stein in 2008
Born(1931-01-13)January 13, 1931
DiedDecember 23, 2018(2018-12-23) (aged 87)
NationalityAmerican
Alma materUniversity of Chicago (Ph.D., 1955)
Known forStein–Strömberg theorem
Spouse(s)Elly Intrator
ChildrenKaren Stein
Jeremy C. Stein
AwardsRolf Schock Prize in Mathematics (1993)
Wolf Prize in Mathematics (1999)
National Medal of Science (2001)
Leroy P. Steele Prize (2002)
Scientific career
FieldsMathematics
InstitutionsPrinceton University
ThesisLinear Operators on Lp Spaces (1955)
Doctoral advisorAntoni Zygmund
Doctoral students

Elias Menachem Stein (January 13, 1931 – December 23, 2018) was an American mathematician, and a leading figure in the field of harmonic analysis. He was professor of Mathematics at Princeton University from 1963 until his death in 2018.

Biography[edit]

Stein was born in Antwerp, to Elkan Stein and Chana Goldman, Ashkenazi Jews from Belgium.[1] After the German invasion in 1940, the Stein family fled to the United States, first arriving in New York City.[1] He graduated from Stuyvesant High School in 1949,[1] where he was classmates with future Fields Medalist Paul Cohen,[2] before moving on to the University of Chicago for college. In 1955, Stein earned a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago under the direction of Antoni Zygmund. He began teaching in MIT in 1955, moved to the University of Chicago in 1958 as an assistant professor, and in 1963 became a full professor at Princeton.

Stein worked primarily in the field of harmonic analysis, and made contributions in both extending and clarifying Calderón–Zygmund theory. These include Stein interpolation (a variable-parameter version of complex interpolation), the Stein maximal principle (showing that under many circumstances, almost everywhere convergence is equivalent to the boundedness of a maximal function), Stein complementary series representations, Nikishin–Pisier–Stein factorization in operator theory, the Tomas–Stein restriction theorem in Fourier analysis, the Kunze–Stein phenomenon in convolution on semisimple groups, the Cotlar–Stein lemma concerning the sum of almost orthogonal operators, and the Fefferman–Stein theory of the Hardy space and the space of functions of bounded mean oscillation.

He has written numerous books on harmonic analysis (see e.g. [1,3,5]), which are often cited as the standard references on the subject. His Princeton Lectures in Analysis series [6,7,8,9] were penned for his sequence of undergraduate courses on analysis at Princeton. Stein is also noted as having trained a high number of graduate students (he has had at least 52 students, according to the Mathematics Genealogy Project), so shaping modern Fourier analysis. They include two Fields medalists, Charles Fefferman and Terence Tao.

His honors include the Steele Prize (1984 and 2002), the Schock Prize in Mathematics (1993), the Wolf Prize in Mathematics (1999), and the National Medal of Science (2001). In addition, he has fellowships to National Science Foundation, Sloan Foundation, Guggenheim Foundation, and National Academy of Sciences. In 2005, Stein was awarded the Stefan Bergman prize in recognition of his contributions in real, complex, and harmonic analysis. In 2012 he became a fellow of the American Mathematical Society.[3]

Personal life[edit]

In 1959, he married Elly Intrator,[1] a former Jewish refugee during World War II.[4] They had two children, Karen Stein and Jeremy C. Stein,[1] and grandchildren named Alison, Jason, and Carolyn. His son Jeremy is a professor of financial economics at Harvard, former adviser to Tim Geithner and Lawrence Summers, and served on the Federal Reserve Board of Governors from 2012 to 2014. Elias Stein died of complications of lymphoma in 2018, aged 87.[5]

Bibliography[edit]

  • Stein, Elias (1970). Singular Integrals and Differentiability Properties of Functions. Princeton University Press. ISBN 0-691-08079-8.
  • Stein, Elias (1970). Topics in Harmonic Analysis Related to the Littlewood-Paley Theory. Princeton University Press. ISBN 0-691-08067-4.
  • Stein, Elias; Weiss, Guido (1971). Introduction to Fourier Analysis on Euclidean Spaces. Princeton University Press. ISBN 0-691-08078-X.
  • Stein, Elias (1971). Analytic Continuation of Group Representations. Princeton University Press. ISBN 0-300-01428-7.
  • Nagel, Alexander (1979). Lectures on Pseudo-differential Operators: Regularity Theorems and Applications to Non-elliptic Problems. Princeton University Press. ISBN 978-0-691-08247-9.[6]
  • Stein, Elias (1993). Harmonic Analysis: Real-variable Methods, Orthogonality and Oscillatory Integrals. Princeton University Press. ISBN 0-691-03216-5.[7]
  • Stein, Elias; Shakarchi, R. (2003). Fourier Analysis: An Introduction. Princeton University Press. ISBN 0-691-11384-X.
  • Stein, Elias; Shakarchi, R. (2003). Complex Analysis. Princeton University Press. ISBN 0-691-11385-8.
  • Stein, Elias; Shakarchi, R. (2005). Real Analysis: Measure Theory, Integration, and Hilbert Spaces. Princeton University Press. ISBN 0-691-11386-6.
  • Stein, Elias; Shakarchi, R. (2011). Functional Analysis: An Introduction to Further Topics in Analysis. Princeton University Press. ISBN 0-691-11387-4.

Notes[edit]

References[edit]

External links[edit]

Academic offices
Preceded by
Albert W. Tucker
Dod Professor of Mathematics at Princeton University
1975–2018
Succeeded by
vacant