Edward Vermilye Huntington

Edward Vermilye Huntington
Born	(1874-04-26)April 26, 1874 Clinton, New York,U.S.
Died	November 25, 1952(1952-11-25)(aged 78) Cambridge, Massachusetts,U.S.
Education	Harvard University(BA,MA) University of Strasbourg(PhD)
Employer(s)	Williams College Harvard University

Edward Vermilye Huntington(April 26, 1874 – November 25, 1952) was an Americanmathematician.

Biography

Huntington was awarded the B.A. and the M.A. byHarvard Universityin 1895 and 1897, respectively. After two years' teaching atWilliams College,he began a doctorate at theUniversity of Strasbourg,which was awarded in 1901. He then spent his entire career at Harvard, retiring in 1941. He taught in the engineering school, becoming Professor of Mechanics in 1919. Although Huntington's research was mainly in pure mathematics, he valued teaching mathematics to engineering students. He advocated mechanical calculators and had one in his office. He had an interest instatistics,unusual for the time, and worked on statistical problems for the USA military duringWorld War I.

Huntington's primary research interest was thefoundations of mathematics.He was one of the "American postulate theorists" (according to Michael Scanlan, the expression is due toJohn Corcoran), American mathematicians active early in the 20th century (includingE. H. MooreandOswald Veblen) who proposed axiom sets for a variety of mathematical systems. In so doing, they helped found what is now known asmetamathematicsandmodel theory.

Huntington was perhaps the most prolific of the American postulate theorists, devising sets ofaxioms(which he called "postulates" ) forgroups,abelian groups,geometry,thereal number field,andcomplex numbers.His 1902 axiomatization of the real numbers has been characterized as "one of the first successes of abstract mathematics" and as having "filled the last gap in the foundations of Euclidean geometry".Huntington excelled at proving axioms independent of each other by finding a sequence ofmodels,each one satisfying all but one of the axioms in a given set. His 1917 bookThe Continuum and Other Types of Serial Orderwas in its day "...a widely read introduction toCantorianset theory"(Scanlan 1999). Yet Huntington and the other American postulate theorists played no role in the rise ofaxiomatic set theorythen taking place in continental Europe.

In 1904, Huntington putBoolean algebraon a sound axiomatic foundation. He revisited Boolean axiomatics in 1933, proving that Boolean algebra required but a singlebinary operation(denoted below byinfix'+') that commutes and associates, and a singleunary operation,complementation,denoted by a postfix prime. Theonly further axiom Boolean algebra requiresis:

(a'+b')'+(a'+b)' =a,

now known asHuntington's axiom.

Revising a method fromJoseph Adna Hill,Huntington is credited with themethod of equal proportionsorHuntington–Hill methodofapportionmentof seats in theU.S. House of Representativesto the states, as a function of their populations determined in theU.S. Census[1].This mathematical algorithm has been used in the U.S. since 1941 and is currently the method used.

In 1919, Huntington was the third President of theMathematical Association of America,which he helped found as a charter member and its first vice-president.He was elected to theAmerican Academy of Arts and Sciencesin 1913 and theAmerican Philosophical Societyin 1933. In 1942 he was elected as aFellow of the American Statistical Association.

References

• Scanlan, M. (1999) "Edward Vermilye Huntington,"American National Biography11: 534-36,Oxford University Press.

External links

• O'Connor, John J.;Robertson, Edmund F.,"Edward Vermilye Huntington",MacTutor History of Mathematics Archive,University of St Andrews
• Photograph of E. V. Huntington,courtesy of theMathematical Association of America.
• NEW SETS OF INDEPENDENT POSTULATES FOR THE ALGEBRA OF LOGIC, WITH SPECIAL REFERENCE TO WHITEHEAD AND RUSSELL’S PRINCIPIA MATHEMATICA^*by EDWARD V. HUNTINGTON from January 1933