Biographical Memoirs Volume 65 (1994) / Chapter Skim
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11. Marston Morse
11. Marston Morse
Pages 222-241
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He further clevelopecl and organized the material in his Colloquium Lectures, presentecI before the American Mathematical Society in 1931 and publisher! by the society in 1934 as vol.
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Morse attended school in Waterville, first the public schools from 1897 to 1906 and then the Coburn Classical Institute from 1906 to 1910. He moved on to Colby College, where he graduated summa cum laude in 1914.
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, he preferred the style Marston Morse and was so known professionally throughout his life. Following the World War, Morse returned to Harvard as a Benjamin Pierce Instructor in the academic year 1~91920.
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The mathematics offices were in Fine Hall along with the departmental offices. This was the old Fine Hall adjoining Palmer Laboratory, which has since absorbed it, not the newer Fine Hall which now houses the university mathematics department.
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Science in 1929; fellow of the National Academy of Sciences in 1932; election to the American Philosophical Society in 1936; Chevalier in the French National Order of the Legion of Honor in ~ 952; associate member of the French Academy of Sciences; corresponding member of the Italian National Academy Lincei. He received twenty honorary cloctoral clegrees and honors from the Polish and Romanian academies.
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have gone ahead toward the principal result, that "these things always work out." Professor Morse was on leave during the semester when T clid the major portion of the real work on my thesis. He was between marriages at the time and spent the semester at the family home in Waterville, Maine, where the sole permanent resident was his unmarried sister.
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From page 229... ...
on classical music. Raoul Bott has written a substantial article of appreciation of Marston Morse ancl his work, beginning with his own reminiscences and those of three principal colIaborators, Maurice Heins, William Transue, and Stewart Cairns.2 In the treatment of the scientific work, Bott has selected
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The word "smooth" will be used to mean "sufficiently differentiable" without being technically precise. Let Mbe a compact smooth manifold of dimension n with local coordinates (x)
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Poincare was aware of the equality when n = 2. The Morse inequalities yield the weaker but very useful inequalities Mi Ri.
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With mild assumptions, he showed that the critical points off lie at a finite number of critical values or levels. The function is constant on a .
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In fact his contributed ten minute oral presentation to the American Mathematical Society preceding (1925) and the first of such offerings preceding ~1928)
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The usual complication of the calculus of variations in parametric form must be resolved in that cTifferent parametrizations of the same curve must be identified or a stanciarcl parametrization introduced. In a major part of the paper (1928)
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The function is the length of a curve joining two points of the manifoIcl and the critical points are the straight lines orthogonal to the manifold at each end. However, the underlying space offers complications.
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However the abstract theory supplies an effective and illuminating extension of the concrete theory that applies to smooth functions and to the functionals of the calculus of variations.
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2. Raoul Bott, "Marston Morse and His Mathematical Work," Bulletin of the American Mathematical Society, 3~180)
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Raoul Bott (New York: SpringerVerlag, 1981~.
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43:33-51. Recurrent geodesics on a surface of negative curvature.
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Providence, R.I.: American Mathematical Society. 1936 Functional topology and abstract variational theory.
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