Person: Walsh (2), Joseph

Joseph Leonard Walsh was an American mathematician who worked in the field of analysis.

His parents were John Leonard Walsh, who was a Methodist minister, and Sallie Ellicott Jones.
By this time Bôcher had died so Walsh had to begin working under a new research supervisor.
Walsh was awarded his doctorate by Harvard in 1920 for his thesis On the location of the roots of a Jacobian of two binary forms, and of the derivative of a rational function.
A Sheldon Travelling Fellowship allowed Walsh to spend the academic year 1920-21 in Paris where he worked with Montel.
Later the functions studied in this work were called Walsh functions and they proved an important tool in digital and signal processing.
It is Walsh functions that have had the biggest impact of any of Walsh's work but nobody would have guessed this in 1923, least of all Walsh.
Walsh had a remarkable publication record.
As a lecturer Walsh believed in teaching a wide variety of courses.
Walsh was honoured with election to the National Academy of Sciences (United States) in 1936 and served as vice president of the American Mathematical Society in 1937 and president in 1949-50.

Born 21 September 1895, Washington, D.C., USA. Died 6 December 1973, College Park, Maryland, USA.

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Origin Usa

Thank you to the contributors under CC BY-SA 4.0!

O’Connor, John J; Robertson, Edmund F: MacTutor History of Mathematics Archive