37. Joseph Leo Doob

President 1963–1964

Ph.D. Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1932

Doob spent most of his academic career at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. His work was in probability theory, complex functions, ergodic theory, and axiomatic potential theory. He also wrote a well-known book on measure theory that was published in 1994 when he was 84 years old. Among his many honors, he was awarded the U.S. National Medal of Science in 1979, and the AMS Steele Prize in 1984 "for his fundamental work in establishing probability as a branch of mathematics and for his continuing profound influence on its development." The AMS Joseph L. Doob Prize, which recognizes outstanding research books, is named in his honor. Doob 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
• Photographs in "Who's That Mathematician? Images from the Paul R. Halmos Photograph Collection" and more photos from the collection