University of California: In Memoriam, 1996
Robert C. Thompson, Mathematics: Santa Barbara
| 1931-1995 | |
| Professor |
Robert C. Thompson, a professor in the Department of Mathematics at the University of California at Santa Barbara, died on December 10, 1995, while waiting for a heart transplant. He was 64.
An international authority on linear algebra and matrix theory, Thompson was one of the founders of ILAS (the International Linear Algebra Society) and of the journal Linear and Multilinear Algebra. He was a contributing editor of Linear Algebra and its Applications and an editor of SIAM Journal on Matrix Analysis.
Thompson was born on April 21, 1931, in Winnipeg, Manitoba; he grew up near Vancouver, British Columbia, and received bachelor's and master's degrees from the University of British Columbia. In 1960, he received his Ph.D. from Caltech, where he was Olga Taussky Todd's first official student. After returning to UBC for three years as a faculty member, he moved to the University of California at Santa Barbara, where he spent the remainder of his career.
At Santa Barbara, he began a long-term professional relationship with Marvin Marcus that included collaborative research and the founding of the Institute for the Interdisciplinary Application of Algebra and Combinatorics. With the arrival of other prominent colleagues, including Ky Fan, Eugene Johnsen, Henryk Minc, and later, Morris Newman, Santa Barbara was for several years a mecca for researchers in matrix theory.
During this period, Santa Barbara did much to focus attention on the subject of matrix theory and to promote the high-level research that has been the foundation of the vigorous, worldwide renaissance of the subject. Young researchers received assistance and inspiration, and many of the Ph.D. students trained at UCSB (Thompson himself had eleven
Thompson's publications include more than 120 papers and four undergraduate textbooks. His work, like that of many researchers, went through many stages and changes in taste, so much so that it cannot be briefly categorized in any accurate way. He read a great deal of the literature on matrix theory and would actually listen carefully to virtually all the talks at a meeting. Because of this very broad knowledge of the subject, he was often able to make helpful suggestions even about topics that he had no interest in working on himself.
Thompson's early work was especially algebraic, often dealing with his thesis area, multiplicative matrix commutators (and their products) over arbitrary fields (a favorite of Taussky Todd's). In that very detailed work, Thompson answered nearly all the major questions in the subject and revealed what would become a hallmark of his work: a willingness and an ability to make unusually elaborate algebraic calculations in order to answer a question. It was not that he did not appreciate external or efficient, implicit tools if they were available. Quite the contrary: he was a major proponent of the use of other parts of mathematics that could be useful in matrix theory. He almost always discovered or convinced himself of important ideas through often very complicated calculations. A unifying theme of the broad middle part of Thompson's publishing career was the drive to discover and understand the exact relation between particular fundamental matrix parameters. His work on invariant factors, for example, became very well known and drew the attention of the systems and control community to his work. His work with integral matrices produced some astonishing results, which are as yet not fully understood, and often involved research on number theoretic issues concerning the structure of groups of integral matrices.
Thompson wrote multiple numbered series of papers during this period and there is still a wealth of information to be found in his nine-paper series on “principal submatrices.” He also wrote a number of articles on the Baker-Campbell-Hausdorff formula, which were of great interest to quantum physicists and to workers in Lie Groups.
Most recently, Thompson returned to one of his favorite areas: generalizations of the field of values and the numerical range, in particular the quaternionic field of values. Thompson rarely spoke about the same piece of work twice, and his fascination with the quaternionic field
Among Thompson's many services to research was his help in dispelling the misinformed view that linear algebra is simple and uninteresting. He often worked on difficult problems, and as much as anyone, he showed that core matrix theory is laden with deeply challenging and intellectually compelling problems that are fundamentally connected to many parts of mathematics. The body of his work was honored with his 1988 Johns Hopkins Summer Lecture Series and his recent (unfortunately posthumous) ILAS Hans Schneider Prize in Linear Algebra.
Thompson will surely be missed as an innovative researcher and expert resource, but his grace and style in the community will be missed as much. He was always encouraging to others and never jealous; he simply worked hard to solve difficult problems--not just to publish--and he was always happy to acknowledge the role of others. He retained his sense of humor and optimism to the end; although fully aware of his condition, he did not let it interfere with his work or discourage him. In fact, shortly before his death, he mentioned hat he had told his doctors they were obligated to keep him alive for at least four more years, since he had just purchased an athletic club membership for that amount of time.
Thompson's early death is a tremendous loss to the mathematics community at large, and he will be sorely missed. He is survived by his wife, Natalie, and Barbara and Ward Fleming, his sister and brother-in-law.
Courtesy of University Archives, The Bancroft Library, University of California at Berkeley, Berkeley, CA 94720-6000; http://bancroft.berkeley.edu/info
http://content.cdlib.org/view?docId=hb0z09n6nn&brand=oac4
Title: 1996, University of California: In Memoriam
By: University of California (System) Academic Senate, Author
Date: 1996
Contributing Institution: University Archives, The Bancroft Library, University of California at Berkeley, Berkeley, CA 94720-6000; http://bancroft.berkeley.edu/info
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