State University of New York at Stony Brook

Robert John Aumann is an Israeli-American mathematician and a member of the United States National Academy of Sciences. He is a professor at the... Center for the Study of Rationality in the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in Israel. He also holds a visiting position at Stony Brook University and is one of the founding members of the Center for Game Theory in Economics at Stony Brook. Aumann received the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics in 2005 for his work on conflict and cooperation through game-theory analysis. He shared the prize with Thomas Schelling. Aumann was born in Frankfurt am Main, Germany, and fled to the United States with his family in 1938, two weeks before the Kristallnacht pogrom. He attended the Rabbi Jacob Joseph School, a yeshiva high school in New York City. He graduated from the City College of New York in 1950 with a B.Sc. in Mathematics. He received his M.Sc. in 1952, and his Ph.D. in Mathematics in 1955, both from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His doctoral dissertation, Asphericity of Alternating Linkages, concerned knot theory. His advisor was George Whitehead, Jr.
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Louis Aston Marantz Simpson is an American poet. He won the 1964 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for his work At The End Of The Open Road. His father was... a lawyer of Scottish descent, and his mother Russian. At 17 he emigrated to the United States and began attending Columbia University, where he studied under Mark Van Doren. During World War II, from 1943 to 1945 he was a member of the 101st Airborne Division and would fight in France, the Netherlands, Belgium, and Germany. Louis was a runner for the company captain, which involved transporting orders from company headquarters to officers on the front line. His company was involved in a very bloody battle with German forces on the west bank of what is now the Carentan France Marina. Simpson wrote "Carentan", a poem about the experience where US troops were ambushed. In the Netherlands, he was involved in Market Garden and Opheusden fighting. At Veghel, his company suffered 21 killed in a brutal shelling while in the local church yard. At Bastogne, he endured bitter cold temperatures while the 101st Division was surrounded by enemy forces for days.
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John Willard Milnor is an American mathematician known for his work in differential topology, K-theory and dynamical systems. Milnor is a... distinguished professor at Stony Brook University. Milnor was born in Orange, New Jersey. As an undergraduate at Princeton University he was named a Putnam Fellow in 1949 and 1950 and also proved the Fary–Milnor theorem. He continued on to graduate school at Princeton and wrote his thesis, entitled "Isotopy of Links", which concerned link groups and their associated link structure. His advisor was Ralph Fox. Upon completing his doctorate he went on to work at Princeton. His students have included Tadatoshi Akiba, Jon Folkman, John Mather, Laurent C. Siebenmann, and Michael Spivak. His wife, Dusa McDuff, is a professor of mathematics at Barnard College. His most celebrated single result is his proof in 1956 of the existence of 7-dimensional spheres with nonstandard differential structure. Later with Michel Kervaire, he showed that the 7-sphere has 15 differentiable structures .
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Chen-Ning Franklin Yang is a Chinese-American physicist who works on statistical mechanics and particle physics. He and Tsung-dao Lee received the... 1957 Nobel prize in physics for their work on parity nonconservation of weak interaction. Yang became a United States citizen in 1964. Yang was born in Hefei, Anhui, China; his father Yang Ko-Chuen was a mathematician and his mother Luo Meng-hua was a housewife. Yang attended elementary and high school in Beijing, and in the autumn of 1937 his family moved to Hefei after Japanese invaded China. In 1938 they moved to Kunming, Yunnan, where the National Southwestern Associated University was located. In the same year, as a second year student, Yang passed the entrance examination and studied at the National Southwestern Associated University. He received his bachelor's degree in 1942, the thesis being about the application of group theory to molecular spectra, under the supervision of Wu Ta-you .
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