Maurice Sion
{{short description|Canadian American mathematician}}
Maurice Sion (17 October 1927, Skopje – 17 April 2018, Vancouver) was an American and Canadian mathematician, specializing in measure theory{{cite web|title=Maurice Sion|website=Martin Brothers Funeral Chapel BC|url=http://mbfunerals.com/vancouver/wp-content/themes/martinbrothers/obituaries/obit_details.php?obitid=13504}} and game theory. He is known for Sion's minimax theorem.
Biography
{{quote|He was born in Skopje (now North Macedonia), to Ladino-speaking Sephardic Jewish parents, Max and Sarah, and spent his early years in Salonika, Greece, Izmir, Turkey and Beirut, Lebanon, before immigrating at the age of 16 with his family to New York.}}
Sion received from New York University his B.A. in 1947 and his M.A. in 1948.{{cite web|title=Maurice Sion|website=ias.edu|date=9 December 2019|url=https://www.ias.edu/scholars/maurice-sion}} He received from the University of California, Berkeley in 1951 his Ph.D. under the supervision of Anthony Morse with thesis On the existence of functions having given partial derivatives on Whitney's curve.{{MathGenealogy|id=17758}} Sion was a member of the mathematics faculty at U.C. Berkeley until 1960, when he immigrated to Canada with his wife Emilie and his two children born in the U.S.A. (His two younger children were born in Canada.) From 1960 until he retired in 1989, Maurice Sion was a professor of mathematics at the University of British Columbia. For two academic years from 1957 to 1959 and in the autumn of 1962 he was at the Institute for Advanced Study. He wrote several books on mathematics and served for many years as the head of the University of British Columbia's mathematics department. In 1957 he was the coauthor with Philip Wolfe of a paper with an example of a zero-sum game without a minimax value.
{{citation | chapter = On a game without a value | first1 = Maurice | last1 = Sion | first2 = Phillip | last2 = Wolfe | pages = 299–306 | title = Contributions to the Theory of Games III | editor1-first = M. | editor1-last = Dresher | editor2-first = A. W. | editor2-last = Tucker | editor3-first = P. | editor3-last = Wolfe | year = 1957 | isbn = 9780691079363 | publisher = Princeton University Press | series = Annals of Mathematics Studies 39}} Sion was an Invited Speaker at the International Congress of Mathematicians (ICM) in 1970 in Nice and was appointed the Main Organizer for the ICM held in Vancouver in 1974. In 2012 he was elected a Fellow of the American Mathematical Society.
Sion was fluent in Spanish, Italian, French, and English.
{{quote|He greatly enjoyed travelling, taking several sabbatical years abroad. His retirement was spent partly in Paris and partly in Vancouver to where he moved back permanently in 2011.}}
He was predeceased by his youngest child. Upon his death he was survived by his widow, three children, and six grandchildren.
Selected publications
=Articles=
- {{cite journal|title=On uniformization of sets in topological spaces|journal=Trans. Amer. Math. Soc.|year=1960|pages=237–245|volume=96|issue=2|url=https://www.ams.org/journals/tran/1960-096-02/S0002-9947-1960-0131506-X/S0002-9947-1960-0131506-X.pdf|doi=10.1090/s0002-9947-1960-0131506-x|last1=Sion|first1=Maurice|doi-access=free}}
- {{cite journal|title=Continuous images of Borel sets|journal=Proc. Amer. Math. Soc.|volume=12|issue=3|year=1961|pages=385–391|doi=10.1090/S0002-9939-1961-0131508-X|last1=Sion|first1=Maurice|doi-access=free}}
- with R. C. Willmott: {{cite journal|title=Hausdorff measures on abstract spaces|journal=Trans. Amer. Math. Soc.|volume=123|issue=2|year=1966|pages=275–309|doi=10.1090/S0002-9947-1966-0200402-7|last1=Sion|first1=M.|last2=Willmott|first2=R. C.|doi-access=free}}
- {{cite journal|title=Outer measures with values in a topological group|journal=Proceedings of the London Mathematical Society|volume=3|issue=1|year=1969|pages=89–106|doi=10.1112/plms/s3-19.1.89|last1=Sion|first1=Maurice}}
=Books=
- {{cite book|title=Introduction to the methods of real analysis|location=New York|publisher=Holt, Rinehart and Winston|year=1968}}
- {{cite book|title=Theory of semigroup valued measures|location=Berlin; New York|publisher=Springer-Verlag|year=1973|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=5Dt6CwAAQBAJ|isbn=9783540378396}}
References
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Category:New York University alumni
Category:University of California, Berkeley alumni
Category:Academic staff of the University of British Columbia
Category:American people of Sephardic-Jewish descent
Category:20th-century American mathematicians
Category:21st-century American mathematicians
Category:20th-century Canadian mathematicians
Category:21st-century Canadian mathematicians