In Memory of Ray Kunze

Kenneth I. Gross and Edward N. Wilson

Ray Alden Kunze the faculties of , Washington passed away on May 21, University, the University of California at Irvine, 2014, after a lengthy and the . At both Irvine and illness. Ray was a long- Georgia he chaired the Department of Mathematics. time member of the He also held numerous visiting positions in the AMS, served on the AMS United States, including the Institute for Advanced Council and a number Study at Princeton, and in England, Belgium, France, of American Mathemat- Italy, Germany, Australia, and Taiwan. ical Society committees, Three aspects of Ray’s research can be singled and was selected as out as especially notable: (i) His joint work with an Inaugural Fellow in Eli Stein in the late 1950s and 1960s (“the Kunze- 2012. He published over Stein phenomena”) in which they constructed fifty research articles, uniformly bounded nonunitary representations

Photo taken by Ken Gross. among which were sem- of a semisimple Lie G and showed that Ray Kunze inal results of primary convolution by an Lp function is a bounded importance in representation theory and harmonic operator on L2(G) for all 1 ≤ p < 2. There is no analysis. As well, his classic textbook on linear analogue in the classical theory, as convolution algebra, co-authored with Kenneth Hoffman, was by an Lp function on Rn is bounded only when translated into many languages and used around p = 1. (ii) His papers on noncommutative Lp the world. spaces associated with a von Neumann algebra, Ray was born March 7, 1928, in Des Moines, a topic initiated by and Jacques Iowa, but lived much of his youth in the area Dixmier in the 1950s and which is now a well- around Milwaukee, Wisconsin. He received his established area with hundreds of contributors. bachelor of science and master of science degrees (iii) His joint work in the 1970s and 1980s with Ken in mathematics from the . Gross on operator-valued Bessel functions (“Gross- A talented tennis player, he was captain of the Kunze Bessel functions”) and their application University of Chicago tennis team. He played to noncommutative harmonic analysis and to competitive tennis and then table tennis all of his the infinite-dimensional representation theory of life. His graduate studies were interrupted during semisimple Lie groups. the early 1950s by military service, during which Ray was also an inspirational teacher who period he served as a mathematical analyst in the advised eleven doctoral students, a number of Department of Defense. Upon completion of his whom have gone on to distinguished careers and tour of duty he returned to his doctoral studies at three of whom are Fellows of the AMS. Those the University of Chicago and in 1957 received his who had the great privilege of being his student doctor of philosophy degree in mathematics. received the best possible mathematical training. Ray began his mathematics career on the faculty of MIT and over the ensuing years served on

Kenneth I. Gross is professor of mathematics at the Univer- sity of Vermont. His email address is [email protected]. Edward N. Wilson is professor of mathematics at Washing- ton University. His email address is [email protected]. edu. For permission to reprint this article, please contact: [email protected]. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1090/noti1283

1190 Notices of the AMS Volume 62, Number 10