Joseph L. Walsh

This volume is a selection from the 281 published papers of Joseph Leonard Walsh, former US Naval Officer and professor at University of Maryland and Harvard University. The nine broad sections are ordered following the evolution of his work. Commentaries and discussions of subsequent development are appended to most of the sections. Also included is one of Walsh's most influential works, "A closed set of normal orthogonal function," which introduced what is now known as "Walsh Functions".

Joseph Leonard Walsh (1895-1973) was an American mathematician. For most of his professional career he studied and worked at Harvard University. He received a B.S. in 1916 and a PhD in 1920. The Advisor of his PhD was Maxime Bôcher. He started to work as lecturer in Harvard afterwards and became a full professor in 1935. With two different scholarships he was able to study in Paris under Paul Montel (1920-21) and in Munich under Constantin Carathéodory (1925-26). From 1937 to 1942 he served as chairman of his department at Harvard. During World War II he served as an officer in the US navy and was promoted to captain right after end of the war. After his retirement from Harvard in 1966 he accepted a position at the University of Maryland where he continued to work up to a few months before his death. Joseph L. Walsh became a member of the National Academy of Sciences in 1936 and served 1949-51 as president of the American Mathematical Society. Altogether he published 279 articles (research and others), seven books and advised 31 PhD students. The Walsh function and the Walsh–Hadamard code are named after him. The Grace-Walsh-Szegő Coincidence Theorem is important in the study of the location of the zeros of multivariate polynomials.