Felix Browder (nonfiction)
Felix Earl Browder (/ˈbraʊdər/; July 31, 1927 – December 10, 2016) was an American mathematician known for his work in nonlinear functional analysis. He received the National Medal of Science in 1999. His two younger brothers also became notable mathematicians.
Felix Earl Browder was born in 1927 in Moscow, Russia, while his American father Earl Browder, born in Wichita, Kansas, was living and working there. He had gone to the Soviet Union in 1927. His mother was Raissa Berkmann, a Russian Jewish woman from St. Petersburg whom Browder met and married while living in the Soviet Union. As a child, Felix Browder moved with his family to the United States, where his father Earl Browder for a time was head of the American Communist Party. The father ran for US president in 1936 and 1940. A 1999 book by Alexander Vassiliev, published after the fall of the Soviet Union, said that Earl Browder was recruited in the 1940s as a spy for the Soviet Union.
Felix Browder was a child prodigy in mathematics; he entered MIT at age 17 in 1944 and graduated in 1946 with his first degree in mathematics. At MIT he achieved the rank of a Putnam Fellow in the William Lowell Putnam Mathematical Competition. In 1948 (at age 20), he received his doctorate from Princeton University.
Browder had an academic career, encountering difficulty in the 1950s in getting work during the McCarthy era because of his father's communist activities. He was championed by Eleanor Roosevelt, the former First Lady, when she was president of trustees at Brandeis University and supported his appointment there; other trustees feared hiring him in that political environment.
Browder headed the University of Chicago's mathematics department for 12 years. He also held posts at MIT, Boston University, Brandeis and Yale. In 1986 he became the first vice president for research at Rutgers University.
Browder received the 1999 National Medal of Science. He also served as president of the American Mathematical Society from 1999 to 2000.
In his outgoing presidential address at the American Mathematical Society, Browder noted, "ideas and techniques from one set of mathematical sources imping[ing] fruitfully on the same thing from another set of mathematical sources" as illustration of bisociation (a term from Arthur Koestler). He also recounted the moves against mathematics in France by Claude Allègre as problematic.
Browder was known for his personal library, which contained some thirty-five thousand books. "The library has a number of different categories," he said. "There is mathematics, physics and science as well as philosophy, literature and history, with a certain number of volumes of contemporary political science and economics. It is a polymath library. I am interested in everything and my library reflects all my interests."
Browder married Eva Tislowitz in 1949, born to Jewish parents. Their children included Thomas Browder, a physicist specializing in the experimental study of subatomic particles, and Bill Browder, who became CEO of Hermitage Capital Management and resides in London.
The late Dr. Browder had two younger brothers who were also research mathematicians, William (an algebraic topologist) and Andrew Browder (a specialist in function algebras). Browder died in 2016 at home in Princeton, New Jersey, aged 89. "In addition to his brothers, survivors include the above mentioned two sons, Thomas Browder of Honolulu and Bill Browder of London; and five grandchildren."
In the News
Fiction cross-reference
Nonfiction cross-reference
External links:
- Felix Browder @ Wikipedia
- Reflections on the Future of Mathematics by Felix Browder (2002)
- "[T]here was a major crisis in 2000, when Claude Allègre was the French minister of science, research, and education. He is a reasonably distinguished geophysicist and has written several books, one called The Defeat of Plato—Plato being a representative of mathematics. In this book he clearly reveals that he does not know about the mathematics pervading fundamental physics after the year 1900. And he is firmly convinced that with the computer one does not need to know much mathematics of any kind to do science. While he was minister, Allègre decided that mathematics was overemphasized in French education. He advocated the elimination of mathematics classes in the schools. Because he was a very close friend of the prime minister, this looked like a very dangerous situation. Mathematicians were saved from the consequences of Allègre’s dogmas, but not through their own influence. Allègre got very much under the skin of the major teachers’ unions in France, who were very angry about his proposed reforms. In France, which has a socialist regime, you do not irritate the teachers’ unions! So no matter how close Allègre was to the prime minister, he had to go. And he went. I do not think his successors have taken up his ideas. This episode illustrates that mathematicians have to be aware and alert in responding when these kinds of problems arise in the institutions that determine our destiny."