Person: Coolidge, Julian Lowell
Julian Coolidge was an American mathematician best known for his texts on geometry and on the history of mathematics.
Mathematical Profile (Excerpt):
- Coolidge was educated at Harvard from where he received his B.A. degree summa cum laude in 1895.
- After studying at Oxford, Coolidge returned to the United States where he taught at Groton school in Connecticut from 1897 to 1899.
- Another interesting note is that one of the pupils that Coolidge taught at this school was Franklin D Roosevelt and the two remained friends for life.
- In 1899 Coolidge was appointed as an instructor at Harvard and, three years later, he became an assistant professor there.
- After spending two years in Europe, Coolidge returned to Harvard where he taught for most of his career (the exception being 1927 when he returned to the Sorbonne in Paris as an exchange professor).
- Coolidge organised courses for his men at the Sorbonne in 1919 and in that year the French government made him a chevalier of the Légion d'Honneur.
- In 1927 Coolidge was appointed as chairman of the Mathematics Department at Harvard.
- Coolidge wrote many good texts on geometry including The Elements of Non-Euclidean Geometry (1909), A Treatise on the Circle and the Sphere (1916), The Geometry of the Complex Domain (1924) and A Treatise on Algebraic Plane Curves (1931).
- The first four books listed above on geometry follow the style of Eduard Study and Corrado Segre but contain many original ideas due to Coolidge himself.
- one of the subject's first treatments in English and one of Coolidge's best known works ...
- Coolidge served both the Mathematical Association of America and the American Mathematical Society as vice-president, the first in 1924 and the second in 1918.
Born 28 September 1873, Brookline, Boston, Massachusetts, USA. Died 5 March 1954, Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA.
View full biography at MacTutor
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Origin Usa
Thank you to the contributors under CC BY-SA 4.0! 
- Github:
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- non-Github:
- @J-J-O'Connor
- @E-F-Robertson
References
Adapted from other CC BY-SA 4.0 Sources:
- O’Connor, John J; Robertson, Edmund F: MacTutor History of Mathematics Archive
