Jesse Douglas
1897–1965, New York City, USA, New York City, USA
American mathematician, one of the first two Fields Medalists (1936), celebrated for the first general solution of the Plateau problem on surfaces of least area spanning a given contour.
Jesse Douglas was born in New York City to a Jewish immigrant family and studied at the City College of New York before earning his PhD at Columbia University in 1920 under Edward Kasner, with a thesis on the geometry of polygon groups. He then turned to the calculus of variations, and by the end of the decade was working on the Plateau problem — whether an arbitrary closed curve in space bounds a surface of minimal area — which had resisted mathematicians since the soap-film experiments of Joseph Plateau.
Douglas's breakthrough came from an indirect route: rather than minimizing area directly, he minimized a conformally invariant energy over parametrizations of the disk, reducing existence to compactness arguments on the boundary. In 1931 he published complete solutions for disks and for surfaces of arbitrary genus and connectivity. At the 1936 International Congress in Oslo he was awarded, with Lars Ahlfors, one of the two first Fields Medals; Norbert Wiener accepted the medal on his behalf since Douglas was too exhausted to attend. He received the Bôcher Memorial Prize in 1943 for his work on minimal surfaces.
Douglas held positions at Columbia, MIT (1930–1936), the Institute for Advanced Study and Brooklyn College, and spent his final decade at the City College of New York. Though brilliant, he struggled with health and employment throughout his career, and after his death in 1965 his achievement was increasingly recognized as the founding chapter of the modern theory of minimal surfaces.
Workplaces: Columbia University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, City College of New York
United States