James Eells


James Eells was an American mathematician, who specialized in mathematical analysis.

Biography

Eells was born on 25 October 1926, in Cleveland, Ohio. Eells studied mathematics at Bowdoin College in Maine and earned his undergraduate degree in 1947. After graduation he spent one year teaching mathematics at Robert College in Istanbul and starting in 1948 was for two years an instructor at Amherst College in Amherst, Massachusetts. Next he undertook graduate study at Harvard University, where in 1954 he received his Ph.D. under Hassler Whitney with thesis Geometric Aspects of Integration Theory.
In the academic year 1955–1956 he was at the Institute for Advanced Study. He taught at Columbia University for several years. In 1964 he became a full professor at Cornell University. In 1963 and in 1966–1967 he was at the University of Cambridge, and after a visit to the new mathematics department developed by Erik Christopher Zeeman at the University of Warwick Eells became a professor of mathematical analysis there in 1969. Eells organized many of the University of Warwick Symposia in mathematics.
In 1986 he became the first director of the mathematics section of the Abdus Salam International Centre for Theoretical Physics in Trieste; for six years he served as director in addition to his appointment at the University of Warwick. In 1992 he retired and lived in Cambridge.
Eells did research on global analysis, especially, harmonic maps on Riemannian manifolds, which are important in the theory of minimal surfaces and theoretical physics. His doctoral students included John C. Wood.
In 1970 he was an invited speaker at the International Mathematical Congress in Nice.
He was co-editor of the collected works of Hassler Whitney. Eells's doctoral students include Luc Lemaire, Peter Štefan, Giorgio Valli and. Eells was married since 1950 and had a son and three daughters.

Publications