Mathematician:Harold Calvin Marston Morse

Mathematician

American mathematician best known for his work on the calculus of variations in the large.

Introduced the technique of differential topology now known as Morse theory.

Nationality

American

History

• Born: 24 March 1892 in Waterville, Maine, USA
• Died: 22 June 1977 in Princeton, New Jersey, USA

Theorems and Definitions

• Morse Theory

• Morse-Bott Function (with Raoul Bott)
• Morse-Novikov Theory (with Sergei Petrovich Novikov)
• Morse-Smale Diffeomorphism (with Stephen Smale)
• Morse-Smale System (with Stephen Smale)
• Thue-Morse Sequence (with Axel Thue)

Definitions of concepts named for Harold Calvin Marston Morse can be found here.

Publications

• 1917: Certain Types of Geodesic Motion of a Surface of Negative Curvature
• 1925: Relations between the critical points of a real function of $n$ independent variables

• 1934: Calculus of variations in the large
• 1938: Functional topology and abstract variational theory
• 1947: Topological methods in the theory of functions of a complex variable
• 1947: Lectures on analysis in the large
• 1973: Variational analysis: critical extremals and Sturmian extensions
• 1976: Global variational analysis: Weierstrass integrals on a Riemannian manifold

Also known as

Usually known as Marston Morse.

Sources

• John J. O'Connor and Edmund F. Robertson: "Harold Calvin Marston Morse": MacTutor History of Mathematics archive