Person: Bowen, Robert Edward
Rufus Bowen was an American mathematician who worked on dynamical systems.
Mathematical Profile (Excerpt):
- His parents were William Emery Bowen, known as Emery, and Marie Jane DeWinter.
- She became a schoolteacher and met Emery Bowen while skiing.
- Robert attended elementary and high schools in Fairfield.
- At the graduation ceremony he was awarded the University Medal as the most distinguished graduating student, the Dorothea Klumpke Roberts Prize awarded to the top ranked mathematics student, and he received the Mathematics Department Citation.
- Let us look first at some of early papers by Bowen which were on graph theory.
- In the first Bowen defines a type of graph, a minimal triangle graph (MTG), obtained by putting together a number of triangles.
- As we mentioned above, Bowen was awarded his bachelor's degree by the University of California at Berkeley in 1967 and obtained a doctorate there three years later in 1970.
- It was at this time that he changed his first name from Robert to Rufus.
- From this point on his papers appear under the name Rufus Bowen while up to that time they had been published under the name Robert Bowen.
- Bowen's doctoral thesis Topological Entropy and Axiom A, supervised by Stephen Smale, was on this topic and he continued to make major contributions to dynamical system theory, building on the work of Poincaré and Willard Gibbs.
- Bowen extended Gibbs's work on invariant measures associated with dynamical systems.
- In 1975 Bowen published the book Equilibrium states and the ergodic theory of Anosov diffeomorphisms in the Springer Lecture Notes in Mathematics Series.
- Another short 45-page book by Bowen appeared in 1978, the year of his death.
- Bowen worked in mathematical dynamics systems theory.
Born 23 February 1947, Vallejo, California, USA. Died 30 July 1978, Santa Rosa, California, USA.
View full biography at MacTutor
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Origin Usa
Thank you to the contributors under CC BY-SA 4.0! 
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- @J-J-O'Connor
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References
Adapted from other CC BY-SA 4.0 Sources:
- O’Connor, John J; Robertson, Edmund F: MacTutor History of Mathematics Archive
