Irving E. Segal ’37

A brilliant mathematician whose work had applications in quantum mechanics and astrophysics, Irving Segal died Aug. 30, 1998. He was 79. He is survived by his wife, Dr. Martha, children Miriam, William, Andrew, and Karen, and four grandchildren.

He prepared at Trenton H.S., where he was into publications, and majored in mathematics at Princeton. He was elected to Phi Beta Kappa, graduated with highest honors, and was awarded the George B. Covington Prize in Mathematics. After graduate school at Yale until 1940 and teaching at Harvard, he joined the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton on a Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship, working from 1941-43 under Albert Einstein. He next had an Army career in the Ballistic Research Laboratory at Aberdeen Proving Grounds. He was professor of mathematics at the U. of Chicago from 1948-60 and then spent 28 years as an expert on functional and harmonic analysis at MIT until he retired, emeritus, in 1989. Back in 1947, he introduced a system of postulates for general quantum mechanics that reworked a number of key concepts and later applied his chronometric theory to astrophysics, leading to a new theory of the red-shift in light from receding stars and a new model of the universe.

The Class of 1937