O. Carruth McGehee
Professor Emeritus
Department of Mathematics
Louisiana State University
Baton Rouge, Louisiana 70803
Email address: mcgehee at math.lsu.edu
A brief biography
The content of the site is the author's responsibility.
Complex Analysis Textbook
Remarks on the Littlewood Conjecture
Brent Pendleton Smith (1949-2006)
The McGehee Award Fund
Review of David Kammler's Book on Fourier Analysis
Notes on Various Mathematical Topics
Materials for Students in Several Courses Taught in 2000 to 2004
Here are links to the Table of Contents and the Preface. If you have the second or later printing of the book, please consult this list of corrections and other emendations. If you have the first printing, here is a further list of corrections. If you find further errors in the book, or if you have questions or comments, please let me hear from you. As a possible aid to teachers using the text, here is a schedule of lectures and assignments from 2002 to indicate one way in which to conduct a one-semester undergraduate course using the book as a text. Also, here is a schedule of lectures and assignments showing how I ran a summer-term course for graduate students in 2001.
In 1993 I had the privilege to give a lecture at a conference held at Orsay in honor of Professor Jean-Pierre Kahane. In the talk, I undertook to describe the conceptual setting of the LIttlewood Conjecture. It is deliberately sketchy but does include a proof of the main result.
The endowment for this award was established, in my honor, at the LSU Foundation through a gracious and kind initiative of the LSU Faculty Senate under the presidency of Professor Claire Advokat. The endowment Agreement appears at this link.
On pages 5-7 of this PDF file you will find my review that appeared in the MAA Monthly. You may ignore pages 1-4, another book review that appeared in the same edition of the Monthly.
Here is a five-page PDF file presenting a solution algorithm for Rubik's cube. I prepared this in 1997 when teaching Mathematics 2040, a "transition course" for mathematics majors to take between the calculus sequence and the more rigorous upper-division courses in algebra and analysis. Part of the course was devoted to beginning group theory. The transformation group of Rubik's cube provided interesting examples. The process of learning how to solve the cube also offered an object lesson in the need to read and write general and somewhat abstract statements. Nearly all the students learned to solve the cube in under seven minutes.
Here is a PDF file in which the properties of the exponential function are derived from its differential equation.
Consider a system of equations representable as x' = Ax when A is an n-by-n matrix. Here is a one-page PDF file, explaining one method of finding a fundamental matrix by hand.
Here is a brief note on differential forms.
The following information comes mostly from an obituary notice by Prof. Louis Pigno, the chair of the Kansas State Mathematics Department.
Brent Smith, Professor of Mathematics at Kansas State University, died near the village of Iliamna, Alaska, securing his fishing boat in a storm; his body was
discovered August 22, 2006.
Brent was born on September 11, 1949, in Falfurrias, Texas, some sixty miles from the Mexican border. Brent attended high school in Williston, North Dakota, received his B.S. from Reed College in 1971, and did his graduate work at LSU. He worked first under Prof. Pasquale Porcelli. After Porcelli's death in 1972, Brent became a student of Carruth McGehee, and received his Ph.D. in 1977. His first academic jobs were at Kansas State University, the University of Kentucky, and Illinois State University. After his work on the Littlewood Conjecture (see above), he was awarded a Sloan Fellowship for 1982-1984 and took a tenure-track position at the California Institute of Technology. Later he held a research position at Bellcore. In 1989 he rejoined Kansas State University as a full professor, where he had three Ph.D. students.
Brent made other significant contributions to the study of the quantitative behavior of Fourier-Stieltjes transforms, and in recent years he worked on a variety of problems in analytic number theory. In much of his research he demonstrated a flair for ingenious combinatorial arguments. Brent was mathematically fearless, and devoted a great deal of effort to problems thought to be difficult, including the dichotomy problem of Fourier analysis. Some of those efforts bore fruit, and he did some very insightful work. He had a number of co-authors, and his Erdos number is one.
During summer months, Brent fished commercially for salmon in Alaska. A descendant, on his mother's side, of New England fishermen, and the son of an oil geologist, he was well acquainted with risk and chance.
Brent is survived by his son Garth Smith, of Ventura, California; his parents Donna May and William Oliver Smith of Sun City, Arizona; his brother Billy; and his sister Brenda Lam, of Raleigh, North Carolina. Memorial contributions may be made to Friends of Mathematics, and sent to the Department of Mathematics, Kansas State University, 138 Cardwell Hall, Manhattan, KS 66506. Brent's family is planning a memorial service to be held on October 21, 2006, at 10:00 a.m. in the Danforth Chapel in
Manhattan.
C.M., 9/27/06
All students should read the file http://www.math.lsu.edu/~mcgehee/2090/advice.html, which includes information about the required texts, the schedule of hour tests, and the grading criteria. Once the course has begun, you should consult http://www.math.lsu.edu/~mcgehee/2090/guide.html on a regular basis. It will be added to frequently, and will contain summaries of lectures week by week, information about tests, suggested problems to do on your own, and exercises to write up and turn in.
All students in the course must read http://www.math.lsu.edu/~mcgehee/4036/syl.html, which includes information about the required text, the schedule of hour tests, grading criteria, and much more. The file http://www.math.lsu.edu/~mcgehee/4036/guide.html contains lecture summaries, assignments, and other information. It will be brought up to date from time to time and should be consulted frequently during the semester. Also, the links available above under ``The book . . .'' may be of interest.
All students in the course must read the syllabus, which includes information about the required text, the schedule of hour tests, grading criteria, and much more. The file of lecture summaries, assignments, and other information will be brought up to date from time to time and should be consulted frequently during the semester.
All students in the course must read the syllabus, which includes information about the required text, the schedule of hour tests, grading criteria, and more. The file of lecture summaries, assignments, and other information will be written as the semester goes along, and should be consulted frequently.
All students in the course must read this file, which includes information about the required text, the schedule of hour tests, grading criteria, and more. Once the course has begun, you should consult the file called "Lectures and Assignments" on a regular basis. It will contain summaries of lectures week by week, information about tests, suggested problems to do on your own, and exercises to write up and turn in. Note: Now that the course is over, the links to exercise sets and solutions are diabled in this file.
All students in the course must read this file, which includes information about the required text, the schedule of hour tests, grading criteria, and much more. Once the course has begun, you should consult the file called "Lectures and Assignments" on a regular basis. It will contain summaries of lectures week by week, information about tests, suggested problems to do on your own, and exercises to write up and turn in.
All students in the course must read this file, which includes information about the required text, the schedule of hour tests, grading criteria, and much more.