Clifford John Earle, Jr.

Clifford John Earle, Jr. (3 November 1935, Racine, Wisconsin)[1] is an American mathematician, who specializes in complex variables and Teichmüller spaces.

Biography

Earle received from Swarthmore College in 1957 his bachelor's degree and from Harvard University in 1958 his master's degree and in 1962 his Ph.D. under Lars Ahlfors with thesis Teichmüller Spaces of Groups of the Second Kind.[2] From 1963 to 1965 he was at the Institute for Advanced Study. In 1965 he became an assistant professor and in 1969 a full professor at Cornell University. From 1976 to 1979 he was the chair of the mathematics department at Cornell.

Earle's research deals with Teichmüller spaces (i.e. moduli spaces of Riemann surfaces) and the related theories of quasiconformal mappings (following Ahlfors and Bers) and Kleinian groups.

With Eells in 1967 he mathematically described, for any compact Riemann surface X, the homotopy types of spaces of diffeomorphisms of X and thus a new characterization of the Teichmüller space of X.[3] In 1969 Earle and Eells extended the 1967 result to non-orientable surfaces, and in 1970 Earle and Schatz extended the 1967 result to surfaces with boundary.

Earle was a Guggenheim Fellow for the academic year 1974/75. In 2012 he was elected a Fellow of the American Mathematical Society.[4]

He has been married since 1960 and has two children.

Selected works

Sources

References

  1. biographical information from American Men and Women of Science, Thomson Gale 2004
  2. Clifford John Earle, Jr. at the Mathematics Genealogy Project
  3. André Gramain. "Groupe des difféomorphismes et espace de Teichmüller d'une surface, d'après C. Earle et J. Eells". Séminaire Bourbaki 426, 1972/73. Announced by Earle and Eells in Bulletin AMS, 1967.
  4. List of Fellows of the American Mathematical Society

External links