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Ronald Getoor

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Ronald Kay Getoor (9 February 1929, Royal Oak, Michigan – 28 October 2017, La Jolla, San Diego, California)[1][2] was an American mathematician.

Ronald Getoor, Oberwolfach 1984

Getoor received from the University of Michigan bachelor's degree in 1950, master's degree in 1951,[3] and Ph.D. in 1954 under Arthur Herbert Copeland with thesis Connections between operators in Hilbert space and random functions of second order.[4] As a postdoc he was an instructor at Princeton University. He became in 1956 an assistant professor and then full professor at the University of Washington. During the academic year 1964–1965 he was a visiting professor at Stanford University. From 1966 until his retirement in 2000 he was a professor at the University of California, San Diego.

Getoor's research deals with probability theory, especially the theory of Markov processes and potential theory. In 1970 he was an invited speaker at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Nice. He was elected a Fellow of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics and in 2012 a Fellow of the American Mathematical Society.

He married in 1959. His wife Ann Getoor worked on the design of commercial aircraft at Boeing, and his daughter Lise Getoor is a professor of computer science at the University of Maryland. Ronald Kay Getoor died peacefully at home on October 28, 2017 in La Jolla at the age of 88.[2]

Books

  • Markov processes: Ray processes and right processes. Lecture Notes in Mathematics 440. Springer Verlag. 1975. 2006 reprint; pbk, 124 pages{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: postscript (link)
  • with Robert McCallum Blumenthal: Markov Processes and Potential Theory. Academic Press. 1968.[5]
  • Excessive Measures. Birkhäuser. 1990. 2012 reprint; pbk, 190 pages{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: postscript (link)

References

  1. ^ biographical information from American Men and Women of Science, Thomson Gale 2004
  2. ^ a b "Ronald K. Getoor's Obituary on San Diego Union-Tribune". San Diego Union-Tribune. Retrieved 2017-11-27.
  3. ^ UC San Diego Mathematics Profile, Ronald Getoor
  4. ^ Ronald Getoor at the Mathematics Genealogy Project
  5. ^ Meyer, P. A. (1969). "Review: Markov processes and potential theory by R. M. Blumenthal and R. K. Getoor" (PDF). Bull. Amer. Math. Soc. 75 (5): 912–916. doi:10.1090/s0002-9904-1969-12282-2.