Edward Burr Van Vleck
Born: 7 June 1863 in Middletown, Connecticut,
USA
Died: 2 June 1943 in Madison, Wisconsin,
USA
Edward Van Vleck's father was a teacher of mathematics at the Wesleyan University where he taught H S White and F S Woods. His father was one of the two vice-presidents of the American Mathematical Society in 1904, the other being Bolza.
Edward Van Vleck attended Middletown High School, then Wilbraham Academy before entering the Wesleyan University in 1880. Here he was taught mathematics by his father. At this stage his interests were in mathematics, physics and astronomy and after graduating with an A.B. in 1884 he spent a year as an assistant in the physics laboratory at the Wesleyan University.
In 1885 Van Vleck became a graduate student at Johns Hopkins University where his interests still ranged through mathematics, physics and astronomy. He studied there under Craig, Newcomb and Story for two years before becoming convinced that mathematics was the topic for him and travelling to Germany to continue his studies.
At the University of Göttingen, Van Vleck attended lectures by Klein, Burkhardt, Fricke, Schwarz, Voigt, Weber and others. His doctorate was awarded by Göttingen in 1893 for the dissertation entitled Zur Kettenbruchentwicklung Laméscher und ähnlicher Integrale written under Klein's supervision. After returning to the United States Van Vleck was appointed as an instructor at the University of Wisconsin.
Van Vleck returned to the Wesleyan University in 1895 as an associate professor and in 1898 was promoted to professor, again moving to the University of Wisconsin in 1906 where he remained a professor until he retired in 1929.
Almost all Van Vleck's research papers were in the fields of function theory and differential equations. He was American Mathematical Society Colloquium lecturer in 1903 giving six lectures on divergent series and continued fractions.
The American Mathematical Society was fortunate to have Van Vleck's support as well as that of his father. Van Vleck was an editor of the Transactions of the American Mathematical Society from 1905 to 1910, vice-president in 1909 and president from 1913 to 1914.
His interests are described in [1] as:-
Travelling and collecting Japanese art... His collection of these prints, numbering thousands of items, is very remarkable, and one of the major private collections.