Elias M. Stein


Elias Menachem Stein was an American mathematician who was a leading figure in the field of harmonic analysis. He was the Albert Baldwin Dod Professor of Mathematics, Emeritus, at Princeton University, where he was a faculty member from 1963 until his death in 2018.

Biography

Stein was born in Antwerp Belgium, to Elkan Stein and Chana Goldman, Ashkenazi Jews from Belgium. After the German invasion in 1940, the Stein family fled to the United States, first arriving in New York City. He graduated from Stuyvesant High School in 1949, where he was classmates with future Fields Medalist Paul Cohen, before moving on to the University of Chicago for college. In 1955, Stein earned a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago under the direction of Antoni Zygmund. He began teaching in MIT in 1955, moved to the University of Chicago in 1958 as an assistant professor, and in 1963 became a full professor at Princeton.
Stein worked primarily in the field of harmonic analysis, and made contributions in both extending and clarifying Calderón–Zygmund theory. These include Stein interpolation, the Stein maximal principle, Stein complementary series representations, Nikishin–Pisier–Stein factorization in operator theory, the Tomas–Stein restriction theorem in Fourier analysis, the Kunze–Stein phenomenon in convolution on semisimple groups, the Cotlar–Stein lemma concerning the sum of almost orthogonal operators, and the Fefferman–Stein theory of the Hardy space and the space of functions of bounded mean oscillation.
He has written numerous books on harmonic analysis, which are often cited as the standard references on the subject. His Princeton Lectures in Analysis series were penned for his sequence of undergraduate courses on analysis at Princeton. Stein is also noted as having trained a high number of graduate students, so shaping modern Fourier analysis. They include two Fields medalists, Charles Fefferman and Terence Tao.
His honors include the Steele Prize, the Schock Prize in Mathematics, the Wolf Prize in Mathematics, and the National Medal of Science. In addition, he has fellowships to National Science Foundation, Sloan Foundation, Guggenheim Foundation, and National Academy of Sciences. Stein was elected as a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1982. In 2005, Stein was awarded the Stefan Bergman prize in recognition of his contributions in real, complex, and harmonic analysis. In 2012 he became a fellow of the American Mathematical Society.

Personal life

In 1959, he married Elly Intrator, a former Jewish refugee during World War II. They had two children, Karen Stein and Jeremy C. Stein, and grandchildren named Alison, Jason, and Carolyn. His son Jeremy is a professor of financial economics at Harvard, former adviser to Tim Geithner and Lawrence Summers, and served on the Federal Reserve Board of Governors from 2012 to 2014. Elias Stein died of complications of lymphoma in 2018, aged 87.