John McCarthy (mathematician)

John Edward McCarthy (born 20 January 1964) is a mathematician. He is currently the Spencer T. Olin Professor of Arts and Sciences, and former chair of the Department of Mathematics and Statistics at Washington University in St. Louis.^[1] He works in operator theory^[2] and several complex variables, and applications of mathematics to other areas.

Early life, education, and career

McCarthy is a native of Ireland, and received a B.A. from Trinity College Dublin, in 1983.^[2] He completed a Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley in 1989. His Ph.D. Advisor was Donald Sarason.^[3]

He originally intended to return to Ireland after his doctorate, but the Irish universities were subject to a hiring freeze at the time. Instead, after postdoctoral research at Indiana University, he joined the Washington University in St. Louis in 1991, and became a US citizen in 1996.^[2] He has been a full professor since 1999, and Spencer T. Olin Professor of Arts and Sciences since 2011. He chaired the Department of Mathematics and Statistics from 2016 to 2021.^[1]

Recognition

McCarthy was one of two 2016 recipients of the Gilbert de Beauregard Robinson Award of the Canadian Mathematical Society^[4] He was elected as a Fellow of the American Mathematical Society in 2018.^[5]

Books

McCarthy's books include:

• Holomorphic Spaces (edited with Sheldon Axler and Donald Sarason), Cambridge University Press, 1998.
• Pick Interpolation and Hilbert function spaces (with Jim Agler), Graduate Studies in Mathematics, vol. 44, American Mathematical Society, 2002.^[6]
• Transition to Higher Mathematics: Structure and Proof (with Bob A. Dumas), 1st ed., McGraw Hill, 2006; 2nd. ed., Washington University Open Scholarship, 2015.
• Operator Analysis: Hilbert space methods in complex analysis (with Jim Agler and Nicholas Young), Cambridge Tracts in Mathematics, vol. 219, Cambridge University Press, 2020.^[7]