| Griffith Conrad Evans | |
|---|---|
| Born | 11 May 1887 |
| Died | 8 December 1973 (aged 86) |
| Residence | United States |
| Citizenship | American |
| Fields | Potential theory Functional analysis Integral equations |
| Institutions | Rice University University of California, Berkeley |
| Alma mater | Harvard University |
| Doctoral advisor | Maxime Bôcher |
| Doctoral students | Alfred Horn Kenneth May |
Griffith Conrad Evans (May 11, 1887 – December 8, 1973) was a mathematician working for much of his career at the University of California, Berkeley. He is largely credited with elevating Berkeley's mathematics department to a top-tier research department,[1] having recruited many notable mathematicians in the 1930s and 1940s.
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Evans earned his PhD at Harvard in 1910 under Maxime Bôcher with a dissertation on Volterra's Integral Equation, after which he did a post-doc for two years at the University of Rome on a Sheldon Fellowship from Harvard.[2] Evans was then appointed assistant professor at Rice University in 1912 and promoted to professor in 1916.[2] He married Isabel Mary John in 1917 and they would eventually have 3 children.[2] In 1934, he moved to University of California, Berkeley to chair the mathematics department.[3] Here, Evans was tasked with improving the department, including the initiation of a graduate program. Much of his success was due to his ability to recruit many notable research mathematicians, including Hans Lewy, Jerzy Neyman, and Alfred Tarski.[1] His own research work was in potential theory and mathematics applied to economics. He chaired Berkeley's department until 1949 and retired in 1955,[3] eventually becoming the namesake of Evans Hall at Berkeley.