Robert Charles Thompson

Robert Charles Thompson (April 21, 1931, Winnipeg, Manitoba – December 10, 1995, Santa Barbara, California) was a Canadian-American mathematician, who gained an international reputation for his research on linear algebra and matrix theory.

Biography
Thompson grew up near Vancouver, British Columbia. He graduated from the University of British Columbia in 1955 with a B.Sc. and in 1957 with an M.Sc. In 1960 he graduated from with a Ph.D. in mathematics from Caltech. His Ph.D. thesis Commutators in the Special and General Linear Groups was supervised by Olga Taussky-Todd. In 1961 the Transactions of the American Mathematical Society published a paper based upon his thesis. In the 1961 paper and in two subsequent 1962 papers, he settled several important open questions. From 1963 to 1966 Thompson was a faculty member at the University of British Columbia. From 1966 until his death in 1995, he was a professor of mathematics at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB). At UCSB, he began a career-long collaboration with Marvin Marcus on some research, as well as the founding and development of UCSB's Institute for the Interdisciplinary Application of Algebra and Combinatorics. Thompson and Marcus recruited several prominent mathematicians, including Ky Fan, Eugene Johnsen, Henryk Minc, and Morris Newman (now known for Newman's conjecture). UCSB's mathematics department gained fame for promoting research in linear algebra and matrix theory, influencing matrix research in Israel, Hong Kong, Portugal, Spain, and elsewhere.

Thompson was the author of four undergraduate textbooks and the author or co-author of more than 120 articles. He did important research on invariant factors, integral matrices, principal submatrices, and the Baker-Campbell-Hausdorff formula. His research was honored with his appointment as lecturer for the 1988 Johns Hopkins Summer Lecture Series.

Thompson was one of the founders of the International Linear Algebra Society (ILAS) and of the journal Linear and Multilinear Algebra. He was a contributing editor of Linear Algebra and its Applications (initiated in 1968) and an editor of the SIAM Journal on Matrix Analysis and Applications.

Upon his death in 1995, Robert C. Thompson was survived by his wife Natalie. In 1996 he was posthumously awarded the Hans Schneider Prize in Linear Algebra of the ILAS.

Articles

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