Call for Contributions.
Ohio Masters of Mathematics
This collection of biographical sketches, which originated as part of Ohio's
Bicentennial celebration, is sponsored by the Ohio Section of the Mathematical
Association of America. It is designed to foster public understanding,
education, and appreciation of mathematics as a human endeavor and Ohio's
contributions to that enterprise.
Click on each name for biographical article.
Listed in order of date of birth.
See also Milestones in Mathematics timeline.
- Jared Mansfield, 1759-1830.
A graduate of Yale, he came to Ohio as Surveyor General in 1803, the year
that Ohio became a state. Starting with a principal meridian that marked the
boundary of Ohio and Indiana, he set up coordinates for a system of townships
and sections that would eventually spread across the nation. He later served
as Professor of Natural Philosophy at the US Military Academy at West Point
from 1814 to 1828.
- Thomas J. Matthews,
1788-1852.
Professor of Mathematics at Miami University from 1845-1852. Earlier he
taught at Transylvania University in Kentucky and Woodward High School in
Cincinnati. He was the first president of the Western Literary Institute and
College of Professional Teachers, and he is known for his work in surveying the
"Matthews Line" between Kentucky and Tennessee and for other civil engineering
projects.
- Joseph Ray, 1807-1855.
Professor of mathematics at Woodward College in Cincinnati and later principal
of Woodward High School. He also served a term as President of the Ohio State
Teachers Association. Ray is best known as the author of one of the most
popular series of American arithmetic and algebra textbooks of the nineteenth
century.
- Ormsby McKnight Mitchel, 1810-1862.
Grew up in Lebanon, Ohio and graduated from West Point in
1829. In 1835 he accepted a position as professor of mathematics, natural
philosophy, and astronomy at the newly revived Cincinnati College. He became
the principal founder of the Cincinnati Astronomical Society in 1842 and
embarked on a trip to Germany where he procured a telescope with a lens nearly
a foot in diameter. Construction of the Cincinnati Observatory on Mount Adams
began in 1843 with John Quincy Adams delivering an oration at the laying of the
cornerstone. Mitchel supervised its construction and served as its director
until 1860. He served as a Union officer in the Civil War and died of yellow
fever while on duty in South Carolina.
- Elias Loomis, 1811-1889.
A prominent astronomer and author of mathematics textbooks who is also known
for his meteorological researches and interest in genealogy. Loomis was
associated with Western Reserve College in Ohio from 1837-1844, where he
supervised construction of the third college observatory in the United States
and collected observations in astronomy, meteorology, and terrestrial
magnetism.
- Eli T. Tappan, 1824-1888
The son of federal judge and U.S. senator Benjamin Tappan. At age 33 he
began a new career in mathematics and education, serving as a
mathematics teacher in Steubenville and Cincinnati, professor of
mathematics at Ohio University, and president of Kenyon College. He was
the author of textbooks on geometry and trigonometry.
- Robert W. McFarland,1825-1910.
Born in Champaign County, he earned A. B. and A. M degrees from Ohio Wesleyan
University. In 1853 he was appointed Professor of Mathematics at
Madison College,
and then in 1856 at Miami University,
Ohio. During the Civil War, McFarland served in the Union Army, rising
to the rank of lieutenant colonel. In 1873 he was appointed as the first
Professor of Mathematics and Civil Engineering at the newly opened Ohio
Agricultural and Mechanical College (now Ohio State University). In 1885 he
returned to Miami, to serve as president for three years.
- Edward Olney, 1827-1887.
Grew up in Wood County, Ohio, and taught mathematics in Perrysburg before being
appointed professor of mathematics at Kalamazoo College (1853) and the
University of Michigan (1863). He was known as a tough, but fair teacher and
the author of a popular series of mathematics textbooks.
- Aaron Schuyler, 1828-1913.
Grew up in Seneca County, Ohio. After serving as principal of Seneca
County Academy for twelve years, he was elected professor of mathematics
and philosophy at Baldwin University (now Baldwin-Wallace College) in
Berea and later became president of that institution. In the 1870's he
published a series of college mathematics textbooks. He left Ohio to
teach at Kansas Wesleyan University in 1885.
Schuyler's able assistant,
Ellen H. Warner, may have been the first
female professor of mathematics at an American college.
- E. W. Hyde, 1843-1930.
Educated at Cornell University as a civil engineer, he came to the University
of Cincinnati in 1875. There he served as Professor of Mathematics, Dean of
the College of Liberal Arts, and President before being forced out in an
academic bloodbath in 1900. He was an associate editor of the Annals of
Mathematics, and he published books on advanced subjects when America was still
a mathematical backwater.
- E. B. Seitz, 1846-1883.
Seitz was also born in Fairfield County, Ohio (see
Finkel). He was mainly
self-taught in mathematics mastering
Ray's texts. He spent one year of
general academic study at Ohio Wesleyan in 1870. A prodigious problem solver,
he is the 5th American elected to the London Mathematical Society.
- Ormond Stone, 1847-1933.
Director of the Cincinnati Observatory
from 1875-1882, where he influenced E.
H. Moore to study mathematics, and where he was the first to establish standard
time for an American city. As Professor of Astronomy and Mathematics at the
University of Virginia, he founded the
Annals of Mathematics in 1884.
- William Hoover, 1850-1938.
Born in Wayne County, he attended both Wittenberg and Oberlin colleges. After
teaching high school in Bellefontaine, Wapakoneta, and Dayton, Ohio, and South
Bend, Indiana, he was elected professor of mathematics and astronomy at Ohio
University in 1883. He attended the first meeting of the MAA Ohio Section, and
he contributed problems and solutions to the American Mathematical Monthly for
over 40 years.
- Ellen Amanda Hayes, 1851-1930.
Born in Granville, Ohio, and graduated from Oberlin College in 1878.
Taught mathematics at Wellesley College from 1879 to 1916 and was appointed head of
the mathematics department in 1888. Writer of several textbooks and in 1891 was elected a member of
the New York Mathematical Society (later to become the American
Mathematical Society), one of the first six women to join.
- Elisha S. Loomis, 1852-1940.
Born in Medina County, Ohio, and a graduate of Baldwin University (now
Baldwin-Wallace College). Taught mathematics in Ohio at all levels,
from the primary grades through college. Known for his compendium of
more than 250 proofs of the Pythagorean theorem.
- R. D. Bohannan, 1855-1926.
Appointed professor of mathematics and astronomy at The Ohio State University
in 1887. He published a number of papers on classical and algebraic geometry
and complex function theory. He helped to organize of the foundational meeting
of the Mathematical Association of America and served as chairman of the Ohio
Section in 1925-26.
- C. J. Keyser, 1862-1947.
Born in Rawson, Ohio, and educated at the North West Ohio Normal School (now
Ohio Northern University). After holding several school positions in Ohio,
Missouri, and New York, he eventually earned a Ph.D. in mathematics from
Columbia University in 1901, and spent the rest of his professional career at
that institution. He is best known for his writings in the area of
mathematical philosophy.
- E.H. Moore,
1862-1932

Born in Marietta, Ohio and graduated from Woodward High School in Cincinnati in
1879. He was a pioneer in the American mathematical research community, and he
founded the mathematics department at the University of Chicago and served as
its head from 1896-1931. He was President of the American Mathematical Society
and editor of the Transactions of the AMS.
- Benjamin Finkel, 1865-1947.
Founded The American Mathematical Monthly in 1894, which led to the founding of
the Mathematical Association of America in Columbus in 1915. He was born in
Fairfield County and received his B.S. and M.S. degrees from Ohio Normal
University in Ada (now named Ohio Northern University, after Finkel's
suggestion). He was professor of mathematics and physics at Drury College in
Springfield, Missouri, from 1895 until his death.
- Harris Hancock, 1867-1944.
A native of Virginia, Hancock obtained a Berlin Ph.D. in 1894 for a thesis on
elliptic functions. He taught at the University of Chicago, where E. H. Moore
was department head, until he was appointed Professor at the University of
Cincinnati in 1900. A strong proponent of classical education, Hancock was
influential in the establishment of Walnut Hills High School in 1920. He
attended the First Annual Meeting of the MAA Ohio Section in 1916 and served as
Section Chairman in 1924-25.
- William D. Cairns, 1871-1955.
Born in Troy, Ohio, Cairns graduated in 1892 from Ohio Wesleyan and earned an A.M. in 1898 from Harvard University. In 1907 he received a Ph.D. degree in mathematics from the University of Gottingen, where he studied under David Hilbert. Cairns was MAA Secretary-Trasurer from the founding of the MAA in 1915 until 1942. After serving as MAA President in 1943-44, he was made honorary president for life. He taught at Oberlin College from 1899 until retirement in 1939.
- Samuel Rasor, 1873-1950.
A native of Ohio, he received his B.S. from Ohio State in 1898 and his M.A.
degree in 1902. He then embarked on a career of teaching and service at OSU
that would last for nearly fifty years. Rasor was the author of several
mathematical papers and three textbooks. He was chairman of the local
organizing committee for the foundational meeting of the Mathematical
Association of America in December 1915, and he served as chairman of the MAA
Ohio Section in 1920-21.
- Charles M. Austin, 1874-1967.
A founder and first president of the National Council of Teachers of Mathemtics.
He was born near Waynesville,
Ohio, graduated from Ohio Wesleyan University, and taught at Milford
High School before moving to Oak Park, Illinois in 1912.
- Grace Bareis, 1875-1962.
A charter member of the MAA and the Ohio Section. She received her A.B. degree
from Heidelberg College in Tiffin, Ohio, in 1897. In 1909 she became the first
person to receive a Ph.D. in mathematics from The Ohio State University, and
she taught at Ohio State until her retirement in 1946.
- C. N. Moore, 1882-1967.
A native Cincinnatian and graduate of Woodward High School. He earned a
Harvard Ph.D. in 1908 before joining the faculty of the University of
Cincinnati. He was highly regarded for his research on convergence factors for
infinite series. He attended the first meeting of the MAA Ohio Section in 1916
and served as Section Chairman in 1918-19.
- Otto Szász, 1884-1952.
A native of Hungary, he came to the United States in 1933 and taught at the
University of Cincinnati from 1936-1952, where he was recognized as an
important figure in the field of classical analysis.
- Louis Brand, 1885-1971.
A native of Cincinnati. He received three engineering degrees from the
University of Cincinnati and a Ph.D. from Harvard. He served on the faculty of
his alma mater from 1907-1955 and was well known for a series of popular
textbooks on vector analysis and mechanics. He was Chairman of the MAA Ohio
Section in 1941-42.
- Otto Marcin Nikodym, 1887-1974.

A Polish mathematician, famous for the Radon-Nikodym Theoreom. He was educated at the Universities of Lwow and Warsaw, and the Sorbonne, taught at the Universities of Krakow and Warsaw and at the High Polytechnical School in Krakow. He came to Ohio in 1948 to join the faculty of Kenyon College, retiring in 1966.
- J. R. Overman, 1888-1978.
J. Robert Overman was the first faculty member hired at Bowling Green State University, then called
Bowling Green Normal College,
and served there for 42 years. He earned degrees in mathematics from Indiana, Columbia,
and a Ph D from Michigan. He wrote a series of ten textbooks in school mathematics.
He establish many programs st BGSU, including the College of Liberal Arts, serving as
the first dean. He also served as the first librarian and provost.
- H. C. Christofferson, 1894-1973.
Professor of mathematics and director of secondary education at Miami
University from 1928 to 1961. He served as president of the National Council
of Teachers of Mathematics (1938-40) and the Ohio Council of Teachers of
Mathematics (1952-54). He was a founder of the latter organization in 1950.
- I. A. Barnett, 1894-1974.
After earning three degrees at the University of Chicago and serving on
the faculties of Washington University, the University of Saskatchewan, and
Harvard, Barnett came to the University of Cincinnati in 1923.
Norbert Wiener credited him for suggestiing a problem in the early 1920s that
eventually led him to the notion of Wiener measure and its application to Brownian motion.
Barnett served as
MAA Ohio Section Chairman in 1933-34 and on the MAA Board of Governors in 1952.
- Tibor Radó,
1895-1965
One of the most prominent of the Hungarian mathematicians to come to the US in
the post-World War I period. He was appointed professor at Ohio State in 1930
in conjunction with the establishment of a graduate program in mathematics. He
served as chairman of the department in the postwar period and was named
research professor in 1948. He is known for his solution of Plateau's problem
in 1930.
- George R. Stibitz,
1904-1995

A 1926 Graduate of Denison University in applied mathematics, Stibitz is recognized as the father of the modern digital computer. He earned a Ph.D. in physics from Cornell in 1930, and joined Bell Telephone Laboratories. From the study of the binary circuits controlled by telephone relays, he built a binary adder circuit and then a full-scale calculator in 1939. Several binary computers of greater sophistication followed.
- Henry Mann, 1905-2000.
Born and educated in Vienna, Austria, and emigrated to the United States in
1938. He was a member of the faculty at Ohio State from 1946-1964. In 1946 he
was awarded the Cole Prize in Number Theory by the American Mathematical
Society for his proof of a conjecture of Schnirelmann and Landau. He authored
80 research papers and three books.
- Eugene Lukacs, 1906-1987.
A native of Hungary, Lukacs emigrated to the United States before the World War
II. He taught at Our Lady of Cincinnati College from 1945-1953 and later
helped to found the doctoral program in mathematics at Bowling Green State
University. In between he taught at Catholic University in Washington, DC,
where he founded the Statistics Laboratory. His monograph on characteristic
functions in probability theory was the first to present a unified and detailed
treatment of the subject.
- Arnold E. Ross. 1907-2002.
Came to Ohio State as chair of the mathematics department in 1963, having
filled that same post at the University of Notre Dame. In 1957 he founded a
summer program for talented high school students, which he taught in and
directed until age 94.
- A. J. Macintyre, 1908-1967.
A native of England, he became Research Professor of Mathematics at the
University of Cincinnati in 1959, and Charles Phelps Taft Professor of
Mathematics in 1963. Macintyre was married to a fellow mathematician,
Sheila Scott,
who died soon after arriving in Ohio.
- Marshall Hall, 1910-1990.
A member of the faculty of The Ohio State University from 1946-1959. He
authored more than 120 research papers on group theory, coding theory, and
design theory, and his highly regarded books Theory of Groups and Combinatorial
Theory are classics.
- Kenneth B. Cummins, 1911-1998.
A high school mathematics teacher and professor of mathematics at Kent
State University. He was best known for his courses, institutes, and
lectures for mathematics teachers.
- Hans Zassenhaus, 1912-1991.
A native of Germany, he came to the United States in 1959 and was invited to
join the faculty at Ohio State by Arnold Ross in 1964. He worked on a broad
range of topics in mathematics and mathematical physics and was a world famous
authority on groups and Lie algebras.
- D, Ransom Whitney, 1915-2007.

Best known for the famous Mann-Whitney U Statistic, the most widely used non-parametric statistic for two-sample tests. He was born in East Cleveland and served for many years on the faculty of The Ohio State University.
- Herbert Ryser, 1923-1985.
A native of Wisconsin, he earned three degrees from the University of
Wisconsin. In 1949 he was appointed assistant professor at The Ohio State
University and was promoted to the rank of professor in 1955. He, along with
Marshall Hall, established Ohio State's tradition of excellence in
combinatorics.
- James R.C. Leitzel, 1936-1998.
A member of The Ohio State University faculty from 1965-1990. He served as
Chairman of the MAA Ohio Section in 1984-85 and was co-founder of the MAA's
influential Project NExT (New Experiences in Teaching), designed to nurture
young mathematics faculty and prepare them for the profession.
Other Histories.
Organized by David Kullman (kullmade@miamioh.edu), Miami University,
and Thomas Hern (hern@wcnet.org), Bowling Green.
Last changed May 6, 2013.
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