Frank_Bonsall
Frank Bonsall
British mathematician
Frank Featherstone Bonsall FRS[1] (31 March 1920, Crouch End, London – 22 February 2011,[2] Harrogate) was a British mathematician.[3]
Bonsall was born on 31 March 1920, the youngest son of Wilfred C Bonsall and Sarah Frank. His older brother was Arthur Bonsall.[4] He married Gillian Patrick, a Somerville graduate, in 1947.[5] Bonsall and his wife were keen hill-walkers.[6] He wrote two articles for The Scottish Mountaineering Club on the definition of a Munro. After his retirement, Bonsall and his wife moved to Harrogate.
Bonsall graduated from Bishop's Stortford College in 1938, and studied at Merton College, Oxford.[5] He served in World War II, in the Corps of Royal Engineers, and in India from 1944 to 1946.[7]
He lectured at the University of Edinburgh from 1947 to 1948; was visiting associate professor at Oklahoma State University from 1950 to 1951; taught at Newcastle University, with Werner Wolfgang Rogosinski in the 1950s. He taught at the University of Edinburgh, from 1963 to 1984.[8] In 1963, a second chair in Mathematics was established (the Maclaurin chair). Bonsall took up the chair in 1965, but spent the following year as a visiting professor at Yale.[4] In 1966, he was awarded the London Mathematical Society's Berwick Prize.
Despite not himself having a PhD, Bonsall supervised many PhD candidates[9] who knew him affectionately as "FFB".
- Compact linear operators, Yale University, Dept. of Mathematics, 1967
- Frank F. Bonsall, John Duncan, Numerical ranges of operators and normed spaces and of all elements of normed algebras, London Mathematical Society, 1971
- Frank F. Bonsall, J. Duncan, Numerical ranges II, Cambridge univ. press, 1973
- Frank F. Bonsall, J. Duncan, Complete normed algebras, 1973[10]
- Gillespie, T. A. (2020). "Frank Featherstone Bonsall. 31 March 1920 – 22 February 2011". Biographical Memoirs of Fellows of the Royal Society. 69: 63–77. doi:10.1098/rsbm.2020.0007. S2CID 222142931.
- "Obituaries". University of Oxford Gazette. 141 (4947): 500. 10 March 2011.
- "Frank Bonsall | Herald Scotland". Archived from the original on 16 January 2015. Retrieved 16 November 2011.
- "Frank Bonsall - Biography". mathshistory.st-andrews.ac.uk. Retrieved 29 October 2021.
- Levens, R.G.C., ed. (1964). Merton College Register 1900–1964. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. p. 290.
- "Frank Bonsall - Biography". Archive.today. Archived from the original on 31 July 2012. Retrieved 29 October 2021.
- Alastair Gillespie (4 April 2011). "Professor Frank Bonsall: Leading mathematician of the post-war years who led research into functional analysis". The Independent.
- "Frank Bonsall - The Mathematics Genealogy Project". Mathgenealogy.org. Retrieved 29 October 2021.
- Rickart, C. E. (1975). "Review: Complete normed algebras by F. F. Bonsall and J. Duncan" (PDF). Bull. Amer. Math. Soc. 81, Part 1 (3): 514–522. doi:10.1090/s0002-9904-1975-13727-x.