Michael P. Drazin

Michael Peter Drazin (born 1929) is an American mathematician of British background, working in noncommutative algebra.

Michael Drazin
Born (1929-06-05) June 5, 1929
Alma materUniversity of Cambridge
Known forDrazin inverse
AwardsSmith's Prize (1952)
Scientific career
InstitutionsPurdue University
ThesisContributions to Abstract Algebra (1953)
Doctoral advisorRobert Rankin and David Rees

Background

The Drazins (Дразин) were a Russian Jewish family who moved to the United Kingdom in the years before World War I. Isaac Drazin founded in 1927 a well-known electrical goods shop in Heath Street, Hampstead, which existed for over 50 years.[1]

Isaac Drazin married Leah Wexler, and had three sons, of whom Michael was the eldest, and Philip Drazin, also a mathematician, was the youngest, the middle son being David; and died 1 January 1993.[2][3]

Life

Michael Drazin was born in London on 5 June 1929.[4] His younger brother Philip was educated as a boarder at St Christopher School, Letchworth during World War II.[5] The self-published memoirs of Roger Atkinson, a school friend of Michael (Mike), indicate that Michael attended King Alfred School, London, located in Hampstead, retaining contacts at the school when it was evacuated in wartime to Royston, Hertfordshire; Atkinson was a boarder at St Christopher School, Letchworth from September 1942. In 1946 Atkinson and Drazin visited Paris together.[6]

Drazin was a student at the University of Cambridge, graduating B.A. in 1950 and M.A. in 1953.[4] He was awarded a Ph.D. in 1953 for a dissertation Contributions to Abstract Algebra written with advisers Robert Rankin and David Rees.[7] He was a Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge from 1952 to 1956, during that period emigrating to the United States.[8]

In the academic year 1957–8 Drazin was Visiting Lecturer at Northwestern University.[9] In 1958 he began a period at RIAS Inc. (the Research Institute for Advanced Studies) in Baltimore as senior scientist, after which he took a position as associate professor at Purdue University in 1962.[8][10][11]

Works

Drazin gave his name to a type of generalized inverse in ring theory and semigroup theory he introduced in 1958, now known as the Drazin inverse. It was later extended to contexts in operator theory.[12]

While at RIAS, Drazin worked with Emilie Virginia Haynsworth, then at the National Bureau of Standards, within its numerical analysis program.[13] He also worked with the metallurgist Henry Martin Otte of RIAS, and they published a book of crystallographic tables.[14][15]

See also

References
  1. Drazin, Charles (25 August 2016). Mapping the Past: A Search for Five Brothers at the Edge of Empire. Random House. pp. 8–9. ISBN 978-1-4735-3842-9.
  2. Searches on the Free BDM site
  3. The Times. No. 64534. January 6, 1993. p. 16. {{cite news}}: Missing or empty |title= (help)
  4. Press, Jaques Cattell (1982). American Men and Women of Science. Bowker. p. 712. ISBN 978-0-8352-1413-1.
  5. Budd, Chris; Peregrine, Howell (1 March 2003). "Philip Gerald Drazin". Physics Today. 56 (3): 100–102. Bibcode:2003PhT....56c.100B. doi:10.1063/1.1570792. ISSN 0031-9228.
  6. Atkinson, Roger; Atkinson, Catherine (2015). Blackout, Austerity and Pride: Life in the 1940s. Roger Atkinson Publishing. ISBN 978-0-9933007-0-7.
  7. "Michael Drazin - The Mathematics Genealogy Project". www.genealogy.math.ndsu.nodak.edu.
  8. Kurz, Heinz; Salvadori, Neri (12 July 2007). Interpreting Classical Economics: Studies in Long-Period Analysis. Routledge. p. 283 note 26. ISBN 978-1-134-08781-5.
  9. "News and Notices". The American Mathematical Monthly. 65 (1): 60. 1958. ISSN 0002-9890. JSTOR 2310326.
  10. "Personal Items" (PDF). Notices of the American Mathematical Society. 5 (32): 432. August 1958.
  11. "Personal Items" (PDF). Notices of the American Mathematical Society. 9 (63): 376. October 1962.
  12. Xue, Yifeng (16 March 2012). Stable Perturbations Of Operators And Related Topics. World Scientific. p. 133. ISBN 978-981-4452-80-9.
  13. United States National Bureau of Standards (1960). National Bureau of Standards Report. The Bureau. p. 3.
  14. Otte, Henry M. (1 August 1961). "Lattice Parameter Determinations with an X‐Ray Spectrogoniometer by the Debye‐Scherrer Method and the Effect of Specimen Condition". Journal of Applied Physics. 32 (8): 1536–1546. Bibcode:1961JAP....32.1536O. doi:10.1063/1.1728392.
  15. Drazin, M. P.; Otte, Henry Martin (1964). Tables for Determining Cubic Crystal Orientations from Surface Traces of Octahedral Planes. P. M. Harrod Company.
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