Joel Smoller

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Joel Alan Smoller (January 2, 1936 – September 27, 2017) was an American mathematician. He was born in Brooklyn, New York, to Benjamin Smoller, a taxi driver, and Olga, who died when he was young. Smoller studied at New York University and earned his PhD from Purdue University in 1963. He then taught at the University of Michigan, becoming a full professor in 1970 and later holding the Lamberto Cesari Collegiate Professorship of Mathematics from 1998. He served as editor of Transactions of the American Mathematical Society from 1981 to 1985 and later edited the Journal for Applied Analysis. Smoller received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1979 and the George David Birkhoff Prize in 2009. In 2013, he was elected a Fellow of the American Mathematical Society in its inaugural class. He retired in June 2017 and died on September 27, 2017, at age 81. After his death, the Joel Smoller Graduate Fellowship was established in his memory.