Clifford John Earle, Jr. (November 3, 1935 – June 12, 2017) was an American mathematician who specialized in
complex variables and
Teichmüller spaces.
Biography
Earle was born in
Racine, Wisconsin in 1935.[1] He received his bachelor's degree from
Swarthmore College in 1957, his master's degree from
Harvard University in 1958, and his
Ph.D. in 1962 under
Lars Ahlfors with thesis Teichmüller Spaces of Groups of the Second Kind.[2] From 1963 to 1965 he was at the
Institute for Advanced Study. In 1965 he became an assistant professor and in 1969 a full professor at
Cornell University. From 1976 to 1979 he was the chair of the mathematics department at Cornell.
With
James Eells in 1967 he mathematically described, for any compact Riemann surface X, the homotopy types of spaces of diffeomorphisms of X and thus a new characterization of the Teichmüller space of X.[3] In 1969 Earle and Eells extended the 1967 result to non-orientable surfaces, and in 1970 Earle and Schatz extended the 1967 result to surfaces with boundary.
with Frederick P. Gardiner Geometric isomorphisms between infinite dimensional Teichmüller spaces, Transactions AMS, 348, 1996, pp. 1163–1190
Sources
Y. Jiang, S. Mitra (eds.): Quasiconformal Mappings, Riemann Surfaces, and Teichmüller Spaces, AMS Special Session held in honor of Clifford Earle Jr., Syracuse 2010, Contemporary Mathematics, AMS 2012
References
^biographical information from American Men and Women of Science, Thomson Gale 2004