F. Burton Jones, Date of Birth, Date of Death

    

F. Burton Jones

American topologist

Date of Birth: 22-Nov-1910

Date of Death: 15-Apr-1999

Profession: mathematician, topologist

Nationality: United States

Zodiac Sign: Sagittarius


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About F. Burton Jones

  • Floyd Burton Jones (November 22, 1910, Cisco, Texas – April 15, 1999, Santa Barbara, California) was an American mathematician, active mainly in topology. Jones's father was a pharmacist and local politician in Shackelford County, Texas.
  • As the valedictorian of his high school class, Jones earned a Regents' Scholarship to The University of Texas, intending to study law eventually.
  • Jones soon discovered that he had a poor memory for dates and history, and thus changed his major to chemistry. Jones had the extraordinary good fortune to be taught freshman calculus by Robert Lee Moore, a founder of topology in the USA, a legendary mathematics teacher, and the inventor of the Moore method.
  • Jones went on to take more mathematics courses than required to be a chemist.
  • He displayed sufficient ability in those courses that when he graduated in 1932, Moore invited him to do a Ph.D.
  • in mathematics and offered him a part-time job as a math instructor.
  • Moore later supervised Jones's Ph.D.
  • dissertation, completed in 1935. Jones then taught at the University of Texas for the next 15 years except during 1942-44, when he was a Research Associate at the Harvard Underwater Sound Laboratory, helping develop scanning sonar for the Navy.
  • In 1950, Jones moved to the University of North Carolina, where he eventually headed the Department of Mathematics.
  • From 1962 until his 1978 retirement, he was at the University of California at Riverside, where he helped launch the doctoral program in mathematics.
  • Over the course of his career, Jones published 67 articles and supervised 15 Ph.D.
  • dissertations.
  • In 1987, he endowed a Chair in Topology at the University of California at Riverside. Jones taught using a modified version of the Moore method.
  • He believed in "learning by doing" but unlike Moore, he incorporated textbooks into his courses.
  • In 1969, Louis McAuley wrote that "the magical powers of Jones in the classroom-a master-who breathes the very life of mathematics into his students."

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