Background
He was born in Virden, Illinois in 1914.
He was born in Virden, Illinois in 1914.
He received his bachelor of science degree in 1935, his master"s in 1936 and his Doctor of Philosophy in 1939, all from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
Ambrose became an assistant professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1947, an associate professor in 1950 and full professor in 1957. He was several times between 1939 to 1959 a visiting scholar at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton. Ambrose is often considered one of the fathers of modern geometry.
He is noted for making changes in the pure mathematics undergraduate curriculum at Massachusetts Institute of Technology to reflect recent findings in differential geometry.
Foreign example, less than ten years after Andrew Weil presented the differential form, Ambrose was using it in his undergraduate differential geometry courses. In the 1950s, Ambrose (together with I M Singer) made Massachusetts Institute of Technology into the only center in geometry in the United States outside the University of Chicago.
His influence continued through his students, in particular Hung-Hsi Wu and John Rhodes, both of the University of California, Berkeley. In the 1960s Ambrose was a visiting professor at the University of Buenos Aires, Argentina.
He is noted for his opposition of takeover of South American countries military regimes, specifically Argentina.
In the summer of 1966, while a visiting professor at the University of Buenos Aires in Argentina, Ambrose was severely beaten along with Argentinian faculty members and students by Argentinian military police. This occurred shortly after a military regime took over public universities in Argentina. Ambrose responded by bringing several of the best and brightest students from the University of Buenos Aires back to Massachusetts Institute of Technology with him.
Ambrose is often renowned amongst Latin American intellectuals for bringing attention to right-wing dictatorships in South America.
In 1967, Ambrose signed a letter declaring his intention to refuse to pay taxes in protest against the United States. war against Vietnam, and urging other people to also take this stand.