Edward Vermilye Huntington

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Edward Vermilye Huntington (April 26 1874, Clinton, New York, USA -- November 25, 1952, Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA) was an American mathematician.

Edward Vermilye Huntington was awarded the B.A. and the M.A. by Harvard University in 1895 and 1897, respectively. After two years' teaching at Williams College, he began a doctorate at the University of Strasbourg, awarded in 1901. He then spent his entire career at Harvard, retiring in 1941. He taught in the engineering school, becoming Professor of Mechanics in 1919. Although Huntington's research was mainly in pure mathematics, he valued teaching mathematics to engineering students. He advocated mechanical calculators and had one his office desk. He had an interest in statistics, unusual for the time, and worked on statistical problems for the USA military during World War I.

Huntington's primary research interest was the foundations of mathematics, to which he contributed by devising sets of axioms (which he called "postulates") for groups, abelian groups, geometry, the real number field, and complex numbers. He was one of the "American postulate theorists" (the term is Scanlan's), American mathematicians active early in the 20th century (including E. H. Moore and Oswald Veblen) who drew up axiom sets and helped found what are now known as methamathematics and model theory. Huntington excelled at proving axioms independent of each other by finding models which satisfied all but one of the axioms in a given set. His 1917 book The Continuum and Other Types of Serial Order was in its day a "...a widely read introduction to Cantorian set theory." (Scanlan 1999) Yet Huntington played no role in the rise of axiomatic set theory taking place around him.

In 1904, Huntington published the paper that first put Boolean algebra on a sound axiomatic foundation. He revisited Boolean axiomatics in 1933, proving that Boolean algebra required but a single binary operation (denoted below by infix '+') that commutes and associates, and a single unary operation, complementation (algebra), denoted by a postfix prime. The only further axiom Boolean algebra requires is:

(a '+b ')'+(a '+b) = a,

now known as Huntington's axiom.

A method Huntington proposed for apportioning seats in the USA House of Representatives was adopted in 1941 and is still in effect.

In 1919, Huntington was the first President of the Mathematical Association of America, which he helped found. He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1913, and to the American Philosophical Society in 1933.