Albert Wilansky

Albert "Tommy" Wilansky (13 September 1921, St. John's, Newfoundland – 3 July 2017, Bethlehem, Pennsylvania) was a Canadian-American mathematician, known for introducing Smith numbers.^[1][2]

Wilansky was educated as an undergraduate at Dalhousie University, where he received an M.A. in mathematics in 1944. From 1944 to 1947 he was a graduate student at Brown University.^[3] In 1947 he received his Ph.D. with advisor Clarence Raymond Adams and dissertation An application of Banach linear functionals to the theory of summability.^[4]

From 1948 until his official retirement in 1992, Wilansky was a faculty member of the mathematics department of Lehigh University.^[3]

He was the university’s Distinguished Professor of Mathematics for the final 14 years of his tenure. During his 44 years at Lehigh he was a Fulbright visiting professor several times, at universities in Reading (1972–1973), London (1973), Tel Aviv (1981), and Berne (1981). Outside of academia he was a consultant for the Frankford Arsenal for the year 1957–1958.^[3]

Wilansky did research in analysis, specializing in summability theory, linear topological spaces, Banach algebras, and functional analysis.^[3] He was the author of several books and the author or co-author of more than 80 articles. He lectured at over 50 different universities.^[2] In 1969 he received the Mathematical Association of America's Lester R. Ford Award for his 1968 article Spectral Decomposition of Matrices for High School Students.^[5] (The 1969 award was also given individually to 5 other mathematicians.)

Wilansky was married to his first wife from 1947 until her death in 1969. They had two daughters. He had three step-daughters from his second marriage.

He was a professional musician for a brief time as a young man and continued playing piano and clarinet and writing songs, often with his wives and daughters.^[2]

• Wilansky, Albert (1949). "An application of Banach linear functionals to summability". Transactions of the American Mathematical Society. 67 (1): 59–68. doi:10.1090/S0002-9947-1949-0032025-7. ISSN 0002-9947.
• —— (1949). "A necessary and sufficient condition that a summability method be stronger than convergence". Bulletin of the American Mathematical Society. 55 (10): 914–916. doi:10.1090/S0002-9904-1949-09307-2. ISSN 0002-9904.
• ——; Zeller, Karl (1955). "Summation of bounded divergent sequences, topological methods". Transactions of the American Mathematical Society. 78 (2): 501–509. doi:10.1090/S0002-9947-1955-0067220-7. ISSN 0002-9947.
• ——; Zeller, Karl (1963). "A biorthogonal system which is not a Toeplitz basis". Bulletin of the American Mathematical Society. 69 (5): 725–726. doi:10.1090/S0002-9904-1963-11003-4. ISSN 0002-9904.
• —— (1976). "On a characterization of barrelled spaces". Proceedings of the American Mathematical Society. 57 (2): 375. doi:10.1090/S0002-9939-1976-0412761-2. ISSN 0002-9939.
• Kalton, Nigel; —— (1976). "Tauberian operators on Banach spaces". Proceedings of the American Mathematical Society. 57 (2): 251–255. doi:10.1090/S0002-9939-1976-0473896-1. ISSN 0002-9939.
• Saxon, Stephen A.; —— (1977). "The equivalence of some Banach space problems". Colloquium Mathematicum. 37 (2). Institute of Mathematics Polish Academy of Sciences: 217–226. doi:10.4064/cm-37-2-217-226.
• Snyder, A. K.; —— (1980). "The Mazur-Orlicz bounded consistency theorem". Proceedings of the American Mathematical Society. 80 (2): 374–376. doi:10.1090/S0002-9939-1980-0577777-5. ISSN 0002-9939.
• —— (1981). "Mazur spaces". International Journal of Mathematics and Mathematical Sciences. 4: 39–53. doi:10.1155/S0161171281000021.

• Functional analysis. New York: Blaisdell. 1964.
• Topics in functional analysis. Springer-Verlag. 1967; notes by W. D. Laverell{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: postscript (link) Wilansky, Albert (14 November 2006). 2006 pbk edition. Springer. ISBN 978-3-540-35525-0.
• Topology for analysis. Waltham, Massachusetts: Ginn. 1970. Wilansky, Albert (2008). Dover reprint. Courier Corporation. ISBN 9780486469034.^[6]
• Modern methods in topological vector spaces. New York: McGraw-Hill. 1978.^[7] Wilansky, Albert (2013). Dover reprint. Courier Corporation. ISBN 9780486493534.^[8]
• Summability through functional analysis. North-Holland. 1984. Wilansky, A. (April 2000). 2000 pbk edition. Elsevier. ISBN 9780080871967.