Murray H. Protter, a former chair of themathematics department at the University of California, Berkeley, whosecalculus textbook sold more than a million copies in the 1960s and ‘70s, diedMay 1 in Berkeley of congestive heart failure. He was 90.
Protter specialized in partialdifferential equations, which deals with the solutions of complex equationsinvolving several variables. Such equations describe key physical processessuch as heat and fluid flow.
In 1964, Protter coauthored withmathematician Charles B. Morrey Jr. the book “Calculus with Analytic Geometry:A First Course.” It sold more than a million copies in the 1960s and ‘70s and becamethe second best-selling calculus text at the time in the United States, according to his son, Philip Protter, professor of operationsresearch at Cornell University.
Protter’s expertise was also sought byindustry. Shell Oil Company consulted him about its failure to find oil whereits seismic surveys and mathematical equations had predicted it would be.Protter pointed out that the company was using partial differential equationsthat had no solutions, and provided the correct formulation of the equation.
From 1943 to 1945 he worked at the C.Vaught Aircraft Company in Stratford, Connecticut, where he calculated the flutter speed of military aircraft, thatis, the speed at which an airplane’s wings begin to vibrate violently -sometimes so violently that the wings fall off. At the time, this was a frequentproblem in airplane design. Protter’s calculations allowed the company to makethe flutter speed faster than the airplane was designed to fly.
Protter was known internationally for hisresearch involving maximum principles and partial differential equations and wasactive in the American Mathematical Society. He authored many books, theresearch book of which Protter was most proud was “Maximum Principles inDifferential Equations,” written jointly with Hans Weinberger and firstpublished in 1967. It was re-issued by Springer-Verlag publishing company in1999.
A campus memorial is planned for Sunday,Sept. 21, 1-4 p.m., at the UC Berkeley Faculty Club.
