Person: Dilworth, Robert Palmer
Bob Dilworth was an American mathematician who worked in lattice theory.
Mathematical Profile (Excerpt):
- Caltech was to play a very important role in Dilworth's life, for it was the Institution that he was associated with for almost the whole of his career.
- At Caltech, Dilworth's doctoral studies were supervised by Morgan Ward.
- Dilworth obtained his doctorate in 1939 and was then awarded a Sterling Research fellowship to study at Yale.
- At this point Dilworth was back at Caltech and he was to remain there for the rest of his career.
- Back at Caltech, Dilworth was promoted to Associate Professor in 1945 and then full Professor in 1950.
- Let us now turn to Dilworth's research contributions.
- By the time Dilworth began his research, the motivation behind much of lattice theory was to develop methods to attack problems in group theory.
- The main topics in lattice theory to which Dilworth contributed are: Chain partitions in ordered sets, in particular his chain decomposition theorem for partially ordered sets; Uniquely complemented lattices; Lattices with unique irreducible decompositions; Modular and distributive lattices, in particular his covering theorem for modular lattices; Geometric and semimodular lattices; and Multiplicative lattices, where he studied, among other topics, abstract ideal theory, and the representation and embedding theorems for Noether lattices and rrr-lattices.
- One important aspect of Dilworth's research was that he always attacked the big problems in lattice theory.
- Let us now turn to Dilworth as a teacher.
- Teaching and examining mathematics played an important part in Dilworth's career.
- Dilworth was Chairman of this Committee from 1957 to 1961.
- In addition Dilworth served on numerous other bodies concerned with the teaching and examining of mathematics.
- Finally we should say a little about Dilworth other than his mathematical interests.
Born 2 December 1914, Hemet, California, USA. Died 29 October 1993, California, USA.
View full biography at MacTutor
Tags relevant for this person:
Origin Usa
Thank you to the contributors under CC BY-SA 4.0! 
- Github:
-
- 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
