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In memory of

Richard Vincent Kadison

Pennsylvania

July 25, 1925 - August 22, 2018

Jul 25, 1925 - Aug 22, 2018

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Richard V. Kadison: 1925-2018
Richard Kadison

Richard V. ("Dick") Kadison passed away after a short illness on August 22, 2018. He was born in New York City on July 25, 1925, attended the Bronx High School of Science, the City College of New York and the University of Chicago (Ph.D. 1950). During World War II, he was a lieutenant in the US Navy.

After Chicago, he was for many years a senior member of Columbia University's Mathematics Department and was attracted to Penn in 1964 as part of the mid-sixties modernization and build-up of Penn's Mathematics Department undertaken by the then Provost David Goddard and the then Chairman Oscar Goldman. Indeed, Provost Goddard gave up his own chair (the Gustave C. Kuemmerle Chair) to help attract Kadison to Penn. Dick held the Kuemmerle chair for the rest of his life.

At Penn, he was instrumental in building a world famous group in his own area of mathematics (functional analysis and operator theory); in the seventies, this was a great attraction for people to visit Penn's Math Department. The area of operator theory is not only pure mathematics, it has deep connections to quantum mechanics and quantum field theory, to probability theory as well as to other areas of mathematics. Dick worked tirelessly at the subject and its applications, he was known world-wide; he was an international mathematician.

During his life, he received many honors. Among these are the Steele Prize for Lifetime Achievement from the American Mathematical Society (1999), election to the National Academy of Sciences (1996), honorary doctor's degrees from the Universite' Aix-Marseille (1986) and the University of Copenhagen (1987), Foreign Member, Royal Danish Academy of Sciences and Letters (1974), and, a few months before his passing, election to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2018).

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