Ray Alden Kunze

Professor Ray Kunze passed away on May 21, 2014. He had a long distinguished career as a leading researcher in group representation theory and harmonic analysis. Kunze was enthusiastic at backpacking and known as a fierce competitor in tennis.

Kunze was born in De Moines, Iowa on March 7, 1928, but lived most of his youth in the area around Milwaukee, Wisconsin. He earned his Bachelor’s degree in 1950, his Master’s degree in 1951, and his Ph.D. in 1957 from the University of Chicago under the direction of Irving Segal. His graduate studies were interrupted during the early 1950’s by military service, during which period he served as a mathematical analyst in the Department of Defense. From 1954-1960, he served as an advisor at the Institute for Defense Analyses.

Ray held a prestigious C.L.E. Moore Instructorship at M.I.T before moving on to the faculties of Brandeis University, Washington University (St. Louis), University of California, Irvine, and University of Georgia. He chaired the Departments of Mathematics at both Irvine (1969-1974) and Georgia (1983-1989). He remained at Georgia as a faculty member there until his retirement in 1996, at which time he moved to Laguna Hills, California. He also held numerous visiting positions in the United States, including at the Institute of Advanced Study in Princeton, and in England, Belgium, France, Italy, Germany, Australia, and Taiwan.

Ray’s mathematical research was characterized by exquisite mathematical taste, deep creative insight, algebraic elegance, and analytical power. Three aspects of his research can be singled out as especially notable: (1) his joint work with Eli Stein in the late 1950’s and early 1960’s in representation theory (the “Kunze-Stein phenomena”), (2) his work on noncommutative Lebesgue spaces, a theory developed by Irving Segal and Jacques Dixmier in the 1950’s which is now a well-established area with hundreds of contributors, (3) his joint work in the 1970’s and 1980’s with Kenneth Gross on operator-valued Bessel functions (“Gross-Kunze Bessel functions”) and their application to noncommutative harmonic analysis and infinite dimensional representation theory.

Among other honors, in 2012, he was named a Fellow of the American Mathematical Society, as part of the inaugural class of fellows.

He was also well-known for his clarity of mathematical exposition. His celebrated textbook on linear algebra, coauthored with Kenneth Hoffman has been a classic for over four decades and has been translated into several languages. He also coauthored a graduate text in functional analysis with Irving Segal. As further testimonial to his reputation as a lecturer, Ray frequently was invited to teach graduate level summer school courses, for example at NSF and NATO institutes and at universities in Italy, France, and Australia.

No summary of Ray’s professional contributions would be complete without taking special note of his extraordinary talents as a mentor of doctoral students. He advised eleven doctoral students, a number of whom have gone on to distinguished careers and three of whom are Fellows of the American Mathematical Society.

Bernard Russo
Professor Emeritus, Mathematics