Background
Wall, Hubert Stanley was born on December 2, 1902 in near Rockwell City, Iowa, United States. Son of Samuel H. and Gratia (Wright) Wall.
Wall, Hubert Stanley was born on December 2, 1902 in near Rockwell City, Iowa, United States. Son of Samuel H. and Gratia (Wright) Wall.
He received his Doctor of Philosophy degree from the University of Wisconsin (now University of Wisconsin–Madison) in 1927. Upon receiving his Doctor of Philosophy Wall joined the faculty at Northwestern University and stayed until 1944 except for the academic year 1938–1939 when he was at the Institute for Advanced Study.
He is also known as one of the leading proponents of the Moore method of teaching. He received the Bachelor of Arts and Master of Arts degrees from Cornell College in Mount Vernon, Iowa in 1924. Her specialty was election law.
He then went to the Illinois Institute of Technology for two years before moving in 1946 to the University of Texas where he spent the rest of his career.
He became an emeritus professor in 1970. Most of Wall"s mathematical research was in various aspects of the analytic theory of continued fractions.
This included the theory of positive-definite continued fractions, convergence results for continued fractions, parabola theorems, Hausdorff moments, and Hausdorff summability. He studied the polynomials now named Wall polynomials after him.
While at Northwestern he started a collaboration with Ernst Hellinger, and he was very interested in Hellinger integrals throughout his career, but did publish anything on them.
While at Texas Wall was a prominent practitioner of the Moore method of teaching. John Parker wrote, "Wall had long ago thrown himself wholeheartedly into the Moore tradition, with his own interpretation of the Moore method, and there was a good deal of cross pollination of students through their courses, some steered to the Doctor of Philosophy by Moore and others by Wall and Ettlinger. Foreign him and for his students it was an unqualified success." Wall had 66 doctoral students, 61 at the University of Texas.
Wall died in Austin on September 12, 1971.
Fellow University of Wisconsin, Madison, 1924-1926, assistant, 1926-1927. Member American Mathematics Society.
Married Mary Kate Parker, October 18, 1947.