Jesse Douglas
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
July 3, 1897 - October 7, 1965
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Scientific Discipline: Mathematics Membership Type:
Member
(elected 1946)
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Jesse Douglas’ work on differential equations allowed him to solve a mathematical problem that had remained unanswered since it was first proposed in 1760. He presented a solution to the Plateau problem: how to find the minimal surface bounded by a contour. He published his work as Solution of the problem of Plateau in the Transactions of the American Mathematical Society in 1931. He was awarded the first Fields medal in 1936 for his discovery.
Douglas attended the City College of New York and graduated with honors in 1916. He then attended Columbia University and earned his PhD in 1920 for his dissertation On Certain Two-Point Properties of General Families of Curves; The Geometry of Variations. He taught at Columbia University from 1920 to 1926 and was awarded a National Research Fellowship from 1926 to 1930. In 1930 he moved to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He was a research fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton from 1934 to 1935 and again from 1938 to 1939.
