25. Griffith Conrad Evans

President 1939–1940

Ph.D. Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1910

Evans worked in potential theory, functional analysis, integral equations and the problem of minimal surfaces. He also wrote textbooks, on functional equations, on economics, and on other topics. Evans served on the faculty at Rice University (Houston, TX) from 1912-1934 (commissioned as a captain in the Air Branch of the U.S. Signal Corps during World War I), and in 1934 went to chair the mathematics department at the University of California, Berkeley, where he was asked to improve the department and set up a graduate program in mathematics. He chaired the department until 1949 (undertaking work related to the war effort during World War II) and retired in 1955. The math building at the University of California, Berkeley is Evans Hall, named in his honor. Evans was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences.

Additional information

• MR Author Profile
• History of the Second Fifty Years: American Mathematical Society, 1939-1988, by Everett Pitcher (AMS, 1988), which includes AMS Presidents from 1939-1988 (and reports on all aspects of the Society during the period)
• The MacTutor History of Mathematics Archive
• Mathematics Genealogy Project
• A Century of Mathematics in America, Part II, Edited by Peter Duren with the assistance of Richard A. Askey and Uta C. Merzbach (American Mathematical Society, 1989), "An Opportune Time: Griffith C. Evans and Mathematics at Berkeley," by Robin E. Rider, p.283