Paul Halmos

Born in Hungary into a Jewish family, Halmos arrived in the U.S. at 13 years of age. He obtained his B.A. from the University of Illinois, majoring in mathematics, but fulfilling the requirements for both a math and philosophy degree. He took only three years to obtain the degree, and was only 19 when he graduated. He then began a Ph.D. in philosophy, still at the Champaign–Urbana campus; but, after failing his masters' oral exams, he shifted to mathematics, graduating in 1938. Joseph L. Doob supervised his dissertation, titled Invariants of Certain Stochastic Transformations: The Mathematical Theory of Gambling Systems.

In 2009 George Csicsery featured Halmos in a documentary film also called I Want to Be a Mathematician.

He is known for his work on Phil Lesh & Friends Live at the Warfield (2006) and I Want to Be a Mathematician (2009). He was married to Virginia Templeton Pritchett.

In 2005, Halmos and his wife Virginia funded the Euler Book Prize, an annual award given by the Mathematical Association of America for a book that is likely to improve the view of mathematics among the public. The first prize was given in 2007, the 300th anniversary of Leonhard Euler's birth, to John Derbyshire for his book about Bernhard Riemann and the Riemann hypothesis: Prime Obsession.

Halmos's 1985 "automathography" I Want to Be a Mathematician is an account of what it was like to be an academic mathematician in 20th century America. He called the book "automathography" rather than "autobiography", because its focus is almost entirely on his life as a mathematician, not his personal life. The book contains the following quote on Halmos' view of what doing mathematics means:

In addition to his original contributions to mathematics, Halmos was an unusually clear and engaging expositor of university mathematics. He won the Lester R. Ford Award in 1971 and again in 1977 (shared with W. P. Ziemer, W. H. Wheeler, S. H. Moolgavkar, J. H. Ewing and W. H. Gustafson). Halmos chaired the American Mathematical Society committee that wrote the AMS style guide for academic mathematics, published in 1973. In 1983, he received the AMS's Leroy P. Steele Prize for exposition.

From 1967 to 1968 he was the Donegall Lecturer in Mathematics at Trinity College Dublin.

In a series of papers reprinted in his 1962 Algebraic Logic, Halmos devised polyadic algebras, an algebraic version of first-order logic differing from the better known cylindric algebras of Alfred Tarski and his students. An elementary version of polyadic algebra is described in monadic Boolean algebra.

Halmos taught at Syracuse University, the University of Chicago (1946–60), the University of Michigan (~1961–67), the University of Hawaii (1967–68), Indiana University (1969–85), and the University of California at Santa Barbara (1976–78). From his 1985 retirement from Indiana until his death, he was affiliated with the Mathematics department at Santa Clara University (1985–96).

Paul Halmos was born on March 3, 1916 in Budapest, Austria-Hungary as Paul Richard Halmos.