Robert Finn (mathematician)

Finn was born in Buffalo, New York. He received in 1951 his PhD from Syracuse University under Abe Gelbart with the thesis On some properties of the solution of a class of non-linear partial differential equations.[1] As a postdoc he was in 1953 at the Institute for Advanced Study and in 1953/54 at the Institute for Hydrodynamics at the University of Maryland. He became in 1954 an assistant professor at the University of Southern California and in 1956 an associate professor at California Institute of Technology. Since 1959 he has been a professor at Stanford University.[2]

At the beginning of his career Finn did research on minimal surfaces and quasiconformal mappings and later in his career on mathematical problems of hydrodynamics, such as mathematically rigorous treatments of capillary action. He was a visiting professor at the University of Bonn and several other universities. He was an exchange scientist in 1978 at the Soviet Academy of Sciences and in 1987 at the Akademie der Wissenschaften der DDR. In 1994 he received an honorary doctorate from the University of Leipzig. For the academic years 1958/59 and 1965/66 he held Guggenheim Fellowships.[3] Since 1979 he has been an editor of the Pacific Journal of Mathematics.

• Finn, R. (March 1953). "A Property of Minimal Surfaces". Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America. 39 (3): 197–201. Bibcode:1953PNAS...39..197F. doi:10.1073/pnas.39.3.197. PMC 1063753. PMID 16589247.
• Finn, R. (October 1954). "On the Flow of a Perfect Fluid through a Polygonal Nozzle. I". Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 40 (10): 983–985. Bibcode:1954PNAS...40..983F. doi:10.1073/pnas.40.10.983. PMC 534204. PMID 16589589.
• Finn, R. (October 1954). "On the Flow of a Perfect Fluid through a Polygonal Nozzle. II". Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 40 (10): 985–987. Bibcode:1954PNAS...40..985F. doi:10.1073/pnas.40.10.985. PMC 534205. PMID 16589590.
• with Paul Concus: Concus, P.; Finn, R. (June 1969). "On the Behavior of a Capillary Surface in a Wedge". Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 63 (2): 292–299. Bibcode:1969PNAS...63..292C. doi:10.1073/pnas.63.2.292. PMC 223563. PMID 16591761.
• Equilibrium capillary surfaces. Grundlehren der mathematischen Wissenschaften. Springer Verlag. 1986.

• Robert Finn homepage, Stanford University