MacTutor
John Leroy Kelley, a member of Berkeley's Department of Mathematics since 1947, who twice served as department chair, died on November 26, 1999. He was born in a small town in Kansas on December 6, 1916, the son of an itinerant minister and a schoolteacher. Kelley, as he liked to be called, described himself as "a genuine, twenty-four-carat country boy." His family was poor, moving through a succession of small towns in Kansas, Oklahoma, and Colorado before joining the depression-era migration to California in 1930, and settling in Los Angeles.
In 1931, after completing his final year of high school in Los Angeles at age 14, Kelley enrolled in Los Angeles Junior College, which in those days was virtually free. (There was only a $3-per-semester activity fee, which could be paid in installments.) He entered UCLA two years later with the thought of becoming a secondary-school mathematics teacher, a plan he abandoned after unpleasant experiences with education courses. He became enchanted with mathematics for its own sake.
Kelley earned a B.A. in mathematics from UCLA in 1936 and an M.S. in 1937. UCLA had no doctoral program at the time, however, so Kelley, following advice from faculty, enrolled in the University of Virginia's Ph.D. program. At Virginia he fell under the spell of G. A. Hedland, E. J. McShane and G. T. Whyburn. He wrote several papers while a graduate student and completed a thesis in topology under Whyburn in 1940 as his country drifted toward war.
After the U.S. entered World War II, E. J. McShane became head of the theory section of the Ballistics Research Laboratory in Aberdeen, Maryland. He summoned Kelley to join his group, arranging for Kelley to be released from his teaching job at Notre Dame. Kelley spent the rest of the war in Aberdeen, where he wrote his first book, Exterior Ballistics, co-authored with McShane and F. V. Reno.
After the war Kelley spent six months at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton -- "to get the rust out of the tubes," as he put it -- and then took up a position at the University of Chicago. He found the mathematics atmosphere in Chicago highly stimulating. Nevertheless, Berkeley succeeded in 1947 in hiring him away from Chicago as an Associate Professor.
Kelley's initial research, following his thesis and stint in Aberdeen, was in general topology. His subsequent development was strongly influenced by his participation, with other young mathematicians, in a 1946-47 Chicago seminar in the rapidly advancing field of functional analysis. Under this stimulus his work turned to Banach spaces, Banach algebras, locally convex spaces, measure theory, and harmonic analysis. He was the first Berkeley faculty member versed in the area loosely termed "modern analysis," subsequently one of the department's strengths.
Kelley had a striking ability to see to the heart of a complicated mathematical situation and to present the subject with new insights and generalizations. We see this in his beautiful treatment of convergence in topology, his recasting and completing of the theory of Banach spaces with the extension property, and his study of positivity in operator algebras (with then student and later colleague R. L. Vaught). Several of his papers have become classics in their fields.
In the late 1940s dark clouds of controversy were threatening the University of California. The Regents had succumbed to a national hysteria and devised a special "Loyalty Oath," requiring employees to swear that they were not members of the Communist Party. Kelley refused to sign the oath on moral principles. With a small group of like-minded faculty, he was fired at the end of 1950. (He was fond of using an expression he attributed to Clark Kerr: "I came to Berkeley fired with enthusiasm and left the same way.") Cast adrift with his wife, Nancy, and their growing family, he was able to find temporary employment at Tulane University in 1950-52 and at the University of Kansas during 1952-53. Fortunately for Kelley and the University, the California Supreme Court ruled in Fall 1952 that the oath was unconstitutional and mandated that the fired professors be rehired. Kelley returned to Berkeley in the fall of 1953. In spite of the difficulty of these years of exile for Kelley and his family, there was a benefit for mathematics students and scholars that continues today. Kelley completed his text, General Topology, which has become a standard for graduate texts in mathematics throughout the world. It has been reprinted and translated into many languages. At Kansas he organized a group of young scholars who wrote a graduate text and scholarly treatise on linear topological spaces, the first exposition of this important subject in English.
Kelley returned to Berkeley in 1953 as a Postdoctoral Fellow of the National Science Foundation. His years of service in administration began in 1955-57, when he was successively Vice Chair of the Department of Mathematics and Administrative Assistant to the Chancellor.
Kelley chaired the Mathematics Department during 1957-60, initiating revolutionary changes in both curriculum and composition of the faculty. He led the faculty to discard several traditional courses for beginning students, adopting calculus as the starting course of the undergraduate curriculum. Upper-division courses were arranged in areas from which math majors met breadth and depth requirements. Simultaneously, he reorganized the teaching of calculus so that every student attended lectures by a professor and discussion sections with a TA, whereas formerly only 10% of the students saw the professor while 90% saw only a TA.
When Kelley became chair, Berkeley's Department of Mathematics was among the leaders in the areas of analysis and logic-foundations, but it recognized the need to build in other areas, notably geometry-topology and algebra. Efforts of previous chairs to lure prominent scholars in our weaker areas had been unsuccessful, in part because people in those areas feared being isolated on the West Coast. Kelley had the brilliant idea of trying to hire senior faculty members two-at-a-time. In 1958 he managed to persuade algebraists Gerhard Hochschild and Maxwell Rosenlicht to accept offers. Later the same strategy worked to bring geometer Shiing-Shen Chern and topologist Edwin Spanier. With those big names on board it was easy to attract young scholars and graduate students in their areas. From 1970 on, the department has been in the top two in national rankings.
Kelley was an exciting teacher; popular with students at all levels. He supervised eight doctoral dissertations and aided many other students with informal advice. His door was always open to students. For many years his Tuesday afternoon Functional Analysis Seminar, invariably followed by beer at LaVal's, was a focal point of the department's modern analysis group.
Kelley's interest in teaching extended beyond the boundaries of the University. As a member of a national school mathematics study group he joined workshops of teachers and professors who gathered to write non-traditional math textbooks and infuse the school math curriculum with ideas that came to be called "New Math." In 1960 he took an extended leave to serve as the National Teacher on NBC's Continental Classroom TV program. His tweed jackets, with pipe ready to be puffed in the close-ups, helped instill confidence among viewers who might have been taken aback by the new ways of teaching he promoted. Back in Berkeley he developed a new course in the Mathematics Department for prospective elementary teachers, and co-authored a text for such courses given elsewhere. In 1964 he introduced a new Math-for-Teachers major so that Berkeley undergraduates could prepare to teach high school math with a strong understanding of the subject; and he devised an internship program to follow their B.A. degree, enabling them to qualify for a teaching credential with a minimum of education courses that had turned off many math students. During 1964-65 he took leave to help set up the mathematics department at a new Indian Institute of Technology in Kanpur, India.
During the sixties and early seventies the campus was torn by dissension over the issues of free speech and the war in Vietnam and Cambodia. As a liberal and a Quaker, Kelley fought for the rights of student protestors and helped students and others who opposed the draft to become conscientious objectors. He and his wife, Ying Lee, were among those arrested during protests.
In the middle of the quieter decade that followed, Kelley served a second term as department chair, from 1975-78. As in his first term, he made important changes that affected both instruction and personnel. The flow of graduate students heading for a Ph.D. had become bogged down at the stage where the students completed qualifying exams and encountered difficulty in securing thesis advisors to see them through necessary research. Kelley got the Department to revise the structure of the program, changing the system of exams and inserting a mechanism for a smoother transition to the research phase. In 1976 Kelley seized an opportunity to challenge the University's nepotism rule when Julia Robinson, the wife of our colleague Raphael Robinson, was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in recognition of her outstanding contributions to mathematical logic. She was the first woman member of the Mathematics Section of the Academy. Kelley promptly arranged for the Department to recommend Julia's appointment as a regular faculty member. She became Professor of Mathematics at Berkeley in early 1977, for the first time bringing the number of ladder-rank women in the Department up to two. Later she was elected president of the American Mathematical Society, the first woman to hold that position.
At various times Kelley served on the Council of the American Mathematical Society, the Board of the Mathematical Association of America, and the U.S. Commission on Mathematical Instruction. He brought the Fourth International Congress on Mathematical Education to Berkeley in 1980.
After his retirement in 1985, Kelley pursued his research intensively for some years in collaboration with T. P. Srinivasan. They wrote a graduate text on measure and integration. Then he took year long trips to visit a son in England and a son in Australia. Finally, he came back to Berkeley to live with his son, Bruce, in a small, charming house Bruce built behind his own. In May 1999, a friend brought him to the annual department dinner where he visited with old colleagues not seen for years. In October he came to a two-day conference on campus to commemorate the battle over the Loyalty Oath 50 years before, and in November he passed away.
John Kelley is survived by his wife, a brother and sister, five children, and seven grandchildren.
Besides his accomplishments in mathematics and education, Kelley will be remembered for the twinkle in his eyes, for his infectious smile, and for his warm manner, which made everyone feel comfortable in his presence. But perhaps most he will be remembered as a man of deep principles, born of the injustices he witnessed during the Great Depression, and borne staunchly throughout his life.
William G. Bade
Leon A. Henkin
Donald Sarason
In 1931, after completing his final year of high school in Los Angeles at age 14, Kelley enrolled in Los Angeles Junior College, which in those days was virtually free. (There was only a $3-per-semester activity fee, which could be paid in installments.) He entered UCLA two years later with the thought of becoming a secondary-school mathematics teacher, a plan he abandoned after unpleasant experiences with education courses. He became enchanted with mathematics for its own sake.
Kelley earned a B.A. in mathematics from UCLA in 1936 and an M.S. in 1937. UCLA had no doctoral program at the time, however, so Kelley, following advice from faculty, enrolled in the University of Virginia's Ph.D. program. At Virginia he fell under the spell of G. A. Hedland, E. J. McShane and G. T. Whyburn. He wrote several papers while a graduate student and completed a thesis in topology under Whyburn in 1940 as his country drifted toward war.
After the U.S. entered World War II, E. J. McShane became head of the theory section of the Ballistics Research Laboratory in Aberdeen, Maryland. He summoned Kelley to join his group, arranging for Kelley to be released from his teaching job at Notre Dame. Kelley spent the rest of the war in Aberdeen, where he wrote his first book, Exterior Ballistics, co-authored with McShane and F. V. Reno.
After the war Kelley spent six months at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton -- "to get the rust out of the tubes," as he put it -- and then took up a position at the University of Chicago. He found the mathematics atmosphere in Chicago highly stimulating. Nevertheless, Berkeley succeeded in 1947 in hiring him away from Chicago as an Associate Professor.
Kelley's initial research, following his thesis and stint in Aberdeen, was in general topology. His subsequent development was strongly influenced by his participation, with other young mathematicians, in a 1946-47 Chicago seminar in the rapidly advancing field of functional analysis. Under this stimulus his work turned to Banach spaces, Banach algebras, locally convex spaces, measure theory, and harmonic analysis. He was the first Berkeley faculty member versed in the area loosely termed "modern analysis," subsequently one of the department's strengths.
Kelley had a striking ability to see to the heart of a complicated mathematical situation and to present the subject with new insights and generalizations. We see this in his beautiful treatment of convergence in topology, his recasting and completing of the theory of Banach spaces with the extension property, and his study of positivity in operator algebras (with then student and later colleague R. L. Vaught). Several of his papers have become classics in their fields.
In the late 1940s dark clouds of controversy were threatening the University of California. The Regents had succumbed to a national hysteria and devised a special "Loyalty Oath," requiring employees to swear that they were not members of the Communist Party. Kelley refused to sign the oath on moral principles. With a small group of like-minded faculty, he was fired at the end of 1950. (He was fond of using an expression he attributed to Clark Kerr: "I came to Berkeley fired with enthusiasm and left the same way.") Cast adrift with his wife, Nancy, and their growing family, he was able to find temporary employment at Tulane University in 1950-52 and at the University of Kansas during 1952-53. Fortunately for Kelley and the University, the California Supreme Court ruled in Fall 1952 that the oath was unconstitutional and mandated that the fired professors be rehired. Kelley returned to Berkeley in the fall of 1953. In spite of the difficulty of these years of exile for Kelley and his family, there was a benefit for mathematics students and scholars that continues today. Kelley completed his text, General Topology, which has become a standard for graduate texts in mathematics throughout the world. It has been reprinted and translated into many languages. At Kansas he organized a group of young scholars who wrote a graduate text and scholarly treatise on linear topological spaces, the first exposition of this important subject in English.
Kelley returned to Berkeley in 1953 as a Postdoctoral Fellow of the National Science Foundation. His years of service in administration began in 1955-57, when he was successively Vice Chair of the Department of Mathematics and Administrative Assistant to the Chancellor.
Kelley chaired the Mathematics Department during 1957-60, initiating revolutionary changes in both curriculum and composition of the faculty. He led the faculty to discard several traditional courses for beginning students, adopting calculus as the starting course of the undergraduate curriculum. Upper-division courses were arranged in areas from which math majors met breadth and depth requirements. Simultaneously, he reorganized the teaching of calculus so that every student attended lectures by a professor and discussion sections with a TA, whereas formerly only 10% of the students saw the professor while 90% saw only a TA.
When Kelley became chair, Berkeley's Department of Mathematics was among the leaders in the areas of analysis and logic-foundations, but it recognized the need to build in other areas, notably geometry-topology and algebra. Efforts of previous chairs to lure prominent scholars in our weaker areas had been unsuccessful, in part because people in those areas feared being isolated on the West Coast. Kelley had the brilliant idea of trying to hire senior faculty members two-at-a-time. In 1958 he managed to persuade algebraists Gerhard Hochschild and Maxwell Rosenlicht to accept offers. Later the same strategy worked to bring geometer Shiing-Shen Chern and topologist Edwin Spanier. With those big names on board it was easy to attract young scholars and graduate students in their areas. From 1970 on, the department has been in the top two in national rankings.
Kelley was an exciting teacher; popular with students at all levels. He supervised eight doctoral dissertations and aided many other students with informal advice. His door was always open to students. For many years his Tuesday afternoon Functional Analysis Seminar, invariably followed by beer at LaVal's, was a focal point of the department's modern analysis group.
Kelley's interest in teaching extended beyond the boundaries of the University. As a member of a national school mathematics study group he joined workshops of teachers and professors who gathered to write non-traditional math textbooks and infuse the school math curriculum with ideas that came to be called "New Math." In 1960 he took an extended leave to serve as the National Teacher on NBC's Continental Classroom TV program. His tweed jackets, with pipe ready to be puffed in the close-ups, helped instill confidence among viewers who might have been taken aback by the new ways of teaching he promoted. Back in Berkeley he developed a new course in the Mathematics Department for prospective elementary teachers, and co-authored a text for such courses given elsewhere. In 1964 he introduced a new Math-for-Teachers major so that Berkeley undergraduates could prepare to teach high school math with a strong understanding of the subject; and he devised an internship program to follow their B.A. degree, enabling them to qualify for a teaching credential with a minimum of education courses that had turned off many math students. During 1964-65 he took leave to help set up the mathematics department at a new Indian Institute of Technology in Kanpur, India.
During the sixties and early seventies the campus was torn by dissension over the issues of free speech and the war in Vietnam and Cambodia. As a liberal and a Quaker, Kelley fought for the rights of student protestors and helped students and others who opposed the draft to become conscientious objectors. He and his wife, Ying Lee, were among those arrested during protests.
In the middle of the quieter decade that followed, Kelley served a second term as department chair, from 1975-78. As in his first term, he made important changes that affected both instruction and personnel. The flow of graduate students heading for a Ph.D. had become bogged down at the stage where the students completed qualifying exams and encountered difficulty in securing thesis advisors to see them through necessary research. Kelley got the Department to revise the structure of the program, changing the system of exams and inserting a mechanism for a smoother transition to the research phase. In 1976 Kelley seized an opportunity to challenge the University's nepotism rule when Julia Robinson, the wife of our colleague Raphael Robinson, was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in recognition of her outstanding contributions to mathematical logic. She was the first woman member of the Mathematics Section of the Academy. Kelley promptly arranged for the Department to recommend Julia's appointment as a regular faculty member. She became Professor of Mathematics at Berkeley in early 1977, for the first time bringing the number of ladder-rank women in the Department up to two. Later she was elected president of the American Mathematical Society, the first woman to hold that position.
At various times Kelley served on the Council of the American Mathematical Society, the Board of the Mathematical Association of America, and the U.S. Commission on Mathematical Instruction. He brought the Fourth International Congress on Mathematical Education to Berkeley in 1980.
After his retirement in 1985, Kelley pursued his research intensively for some years in collaboration with T. P. Srinivasan. They wrote a graduate text on measure and integration. Then he took year long trips to visit a son in England and a son in Australia. Finally, he came back to Berkeley to live with his son, Bruce, in a small, charming house Bruce built behind his own. In May 1999, a friend brought him to the annual department dinner where he visited with old colleagues not seen for years. In October he came to a two-day conference on campus to commemorate the battle over the Loyalty Oath 50 years before, and in November he passed away.
John Kelley is survived by his wife, a brother and sister, five children, and seven grandchildren.
Besides his accomplishments in mathematics and education, Kelley will be remembered for the twinkle in his eyes, for his infectious smile, and for his warm manner, which made everyone feel comfortable in his presence. But perhaps most he will be remembered as a man of deep principles, born of the injustices he witnessed during the Great Depression, and borne staunchly throughout his life.
William G. Bade
Leon A. Henkin
Donald Sarason
This University of California obituary is available at THIS LINK