Arthur Everett Pitcher was an American mathematician, known for early pioneering work on exact sequences and applying Morse theory to homotopy theory.
Background
Everett Pitcher grew up in Cleveland, where his father, Arthur Dunn Pitcher, headed the mathematics department at Adelbert College of Western Reserve University until he died of heart failure in 1924 at the age of 43. Everett Pitcher"s mother was a math teacher, and his father received a Doctor of Philosophy in mathematics from the University of Chicago under E. H. Moore.
Education
Everett Pitcher received in 1932 an Bachelor of Arts from Western Reserve University, in 1933 an Master of Arts, and in 1935 a Doctor of Philosophy from Harvard University under Marston Morse with the thesis Certain Invariants of Closed Extremals.
Career
After two years as a Benjamin Peirce Instructor at Harvard, Pitcher joined the mathematics faculty of Lehigh University in 1938, where he remained except for a leave of absence serving in the United States Army during World World War II and for some sabbaticals. At Lehigh he served as chair of the department from 1960 until his retirement in 1978. He was a Guggenheim Fellow for the academic year 1952–1953.
Everett gave an Invited Address to the American Mathematical Society in 1955, published as "Inequalities of critical point theory".
He was an American Mathematical Society Associate Secretary from 1959 to 1966 and then Secretary of the American Mathematical Society from 1966 to 1988. In 1936 Everett married Sarah Mathiott Hindman.
The marriage produced two daughters, Susan Pitcher and Joan Pitcher Morrison. After Sarah Everett died in 1972, Everett in 1973 married Theresa Sell, who died in 2001.
In honor of Pitcher, Lehigh established the Pitcher Chair in Mathematics and the Pitcher Research Scholars in Mathematics.
In 1985 the Mathematical Association of America gave Everett Pitcher the Award for Distinguished Service. He described his work for the American Mathematical Society in his reminiscences "Office the Record".
Membership
Pitcher was one of the founders of the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics and a member of its Board of Trustees from 1961 to 1963.