Leonidas Alaoglu


Leonidas Alaoglu was a mathematician, known for his result, called Alaoglu's theorem on the weak-star compactness of the closed unit ball in the dual of a normed space, also known as the Banach–Alaoglu theorem.

Life and work

Alaoglu was born in Red Deer, Alberta to Greek parents. He received his BS in 1936, Master's in 1937, and PhD in 1938, all from the University of Chicago. His thesis, written under the direction of Lawrence M. Graves was entitled Weak topologies of normed linear spaces. His doctoral thesis is the source of Alaoglu's theorem. The Bourbaki–Alaoglu theorem is a generalization of this result by Bourbaki to dual topologies.
After some years teaching at Pennsylvania State College, Harvard University and Purdue University, in 1944 he became an operations analyst for the United States Air Force. In his last position, from 1953 to 1981 he worked as a senior scientist in operations research at the Lockheed Corporation in Burbank, California. In this latter period he wrote numerous research reports, some of them classified.
During the Lockheed years he took an active part in seminars and other mathematical activities at Caltech, UCLA and USC. After his death in 1981 a was established at Caltech. Speakers have included Paul Erdős, Irving Kaplansky, Paul Halmos and Hugh Woodin.

Publications

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