Remembering

Walter Rudin
(19212010)

alter Rudin, Vilas Professor Emeritus at the University of WisconsinMadison, died on May 20, 2010, at
his home in Madison after a long
battle with Parkinsons disease. He
was born in Vienna on May 2, 1921.
The Rudins were a well-established Jewish
family which began its rise to prominence in
the first third of the nineteenth century. By the
1830s, Walters great-grandfather, Aron Pollak,
had built a factory to manufacture matches; he
also became known for his charitable activities,
including the construction of a residence hall
where seventy-five needy students at the Technical
University in Vienna could live without paying rent.
As a result, Aron was knighted by Emperor Franz
Joseph in 1869 and took the name Aron Ritter
Pollak von Rudin. The Rudin family prospered, and
Walters father, Robert, was a factory owner and
electrical engineer, with a particular interest in
sound recording and radio technology. He married
Walters mother, Natalie (Natasza) Adlersberg, in
1920. Walters sister, Vera, was born in 1925.
After the Anschluss in 1938, the situation for
Austrian Jews became impossible, and the Rudin
family left Vienna. Walter served in the British
Army and Navy during the Second World War, and
rejoined his parents and sister in New York in late
Alexander Nagel is emeritus professor of mathematics at
the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His email address is
nagel@math.wisc.edu.
Edgar Lee Stout is emeritus professor of mathematics at the
University of Washington. His email address is stout@math.
washington.edu.
DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1090/noti955

March 2013

1945. He entered Duke University, obtaining a B.A. in

1947 and a Ph.D. in mathematics in 1949. He was
a C. L. E. Moore Instructor
at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and
began teaching at the University of Rochester in
1952.
While on leave visiting
Yale in 1958, Rudin received a call from R. H.
Bing at the University of
Wisconsin-Madison, asking if he would be
interested in teaching summer school. Rudin said
that, since he had a Sloan
Fellowship, he wasnt interWalter Rudin and sister, Vera, in
ested in summer teaching.
Vienna.
Then, as he writes in his
autobiography, As I Remember It, my brain slipped
out of gear but my tongue kept on talking and I
heard it say but how about a real job? As a result,
Walter Rudin joined the Department of Mathematics at UW-Madison in 1959, where he remained
until his retirement as Vilas Professor in 1991.
He and his wife, the distinguished mathematician
Mary Ellen (Estill) Rudin, were popular teachers at
both the undergraduate and graduate level and
served as mentors for many graduate students.
They lived in Madison in a house designed by Frank
Lloyd Wright, and its intriguing architecture and
two-story-high living room made it a center for
social life in the department.

Notices of the AMS

Photograph courtesy of Mary Ellen Rudin.

Alexander Nagel and Edgar Lee Stout,

Coordinating Editors

295

Photograph courtesy of Mary Ellen

Rudin.

296

Walter Rudin
was one of the
preeminent mathematicians of his
generation.
He
worked in a number of different
areas of mathematical analysis,
and he made major contributions
Rudin house, Madison. to each. His early
work reflected his classical training and focused on
the study of trigonometric series and holomorphic
functions of one complex variable. He was also
very influenced by the then relatively new study of
Banach algebras and function algebras. One of his
important results in this area, building on the work
of Arne Beurling, is the complete characterization
of the closed ideals in the disk algebra in 1956.
Another major area of Walters interest was
the general theory of harmonic analysis on locally
compact Abelian groups. In the late 1950s and
1960s this was a very active and popular area
of research, and perhaps only partially in jest,
Walter suggested that mathematicians introduce a
new word, lgbalcag, to replace the phrase Let
G be a locally compact Abelian group, which
is how almost every analysis seminar began in
those days. One of Walters major achievements in
this area was his 1959 work with Helson, Kahane,
and Katznelson, which characterized the functions
that operate on the Fourier transforms of the
L1 -algebra. Rudin synthesized this aspect of his
mathematical career in his 1962 book, Fourier
Analysis on Groups.
Walters interests changed again in the late
1960s, and he began to work on problems in
several complex variables. At that time the study of
the analytic aspects of complex analysis in several
variables was relatively new and unexplored, and
it was not even clear what the right severalvariable generalization of the one-dimensional
unit disk should be. There are at least two
candidates: the polydisk and the ball. Walter
did important work with both. For example, he
showed for the polydisk (1967) and the unit ball
(1976) that the zero sets of different H p classes
of functions are all different. His work on the
inner function conjecture led to a tremendous
amount of research, and after the solution by
Aleksandrov and Hakim-Sibony-Lw (1981), Walter
made additional important contributions to this
question. Much of Rudins work in several complex
variables is presented in three of his advanced
books. The first, published in 1969, is Function
Theory in Polydiscs. The second, published in 1980,
is Function Theory in the Unit Ball of Cn . His work on

inner functions was summarized in a series of NSFCBMS lectures, which were then published in 1986
as New Constructions of Functions Holomorphic in
the Unit Ball of Cn .
Walter Rudin is also known to generations of
undergraduate and graduate students for his three
outstanding textbooks: Principles of Mathematical
Analysis (1953), Real and Complex Analysis (1966),
and Functional Analysis (1973). In 1993 he was
awarded the American Mathematical Societys
Leroy P. Steele Prize for Mathematical Exposition.
He received an honorary degree from the University
of Vienna in 2006.
In addition to his widow, Mary Ellen, Walter Rudin
is survived by his four children: Catherine Rudin,
professor of modern languages and linguistics at
Wayne State College, Nebraska; Eleanor Rudin, an
engineer working for 3M in St. Paul, Minnesota;
Robert Rudin of Madison, Wisconsin; and Charles
Rudin, professor of oncology at the Johns Hopkins
University in Baltimore. He is also survived by four
grandchildren: Adem, Deniz, Sofia, and Natalie.

Jean-Pierre Kahane
Walter Rudin and Harmonic Analysis
The work of Walter Rudin on harmonic analysis is
a good part of his life and also of mine. A guide
for most of it is the list of his papers on Fourier
analysis on groups at the end of his celebrated
book. I shall start with a few of them and add
some complements. This is nothing but a glance
at a large piece of harmonic analysis.
The general inspiration for Walter was to discover questions and results arising from the
algebraic structure of some parts of analysis.
Wiener and Gelfand had paved the way. It became
the main tendency in harmonic analysis in the
middle of the twentieth century.
Part of Walters work deals with the Wiener
algebras, that is, the algebras made of Fourier
transforms of integrable functions or summable
sequences. A related matter is trigonometric series.
Another is convolution algebras of Radon measures.
A general framework is the Gelfand theory of
Banach algebras. Generally speaking, there are
several ways to express the same problems and
results: classical in the sense of the nineteenth
century or abstract and modern in the sense of
the twentieth. Moreover, as far as Fourier analysis
is concerned, what happens on a group can be
expressed on the dual group. Equivalent definitions
can be found everywhere, and Walter was an expert
in playing this game.
Jean-Pierre Kahane is emeritus professor of mathematics at the Universit de Paris-Sud. His email address is
jean-pierre.kahane@math.u-psud.fr.

Notices of the AMS

Volume 60, Number 3

March 2013

to Lp (G ) (here G is the
dual group of G), with p <
2 (depending on f ), then F
is the restriction on (1, 1)
of an analytic function in a
neighborhood of the closed
interval [1, 1].
The main event in the domain after 1958 was the
theorem of Malliavin on
spectral synthesis in 1959.
Spectral synthesis can be expressed in many ways, as
well as nonspectral synthesis.
The contribution of Walter in
that subject was to exhibit a
function f in A(G) such that
the ideals generated by the Rudin in 1956.
powers f n are all different
(see [4]).
The question on functions operating on A(R)
or A(T) goes back to Paul Lvy (1938) in the
paper where the Wiener-Lvy theorem is stated.
Paul Lvy asked a second question, on functions
operating below: which are the changes of
variables preserving A(R)? The obvious example
is affine functions.
Actually affine functions are the only ones; it
is a theorem of Beurling and Helson, published
in 1953. It opened a new and important field, the
isomorphisms and endomorphisms of the group
algebras. Walter entered the subject in 1956 with his
Acta Mathematica article [5] on the automorphisms
and the endomorphisms of the group algebra of the
unit circle. Here is a typical result: a permutation of
the integers carries Fourier coefficients into Fourier
coefficients if and only if the permutation is equal
to an obvious one, up to a finite number of places;
an obvious one is a permutation p that satisfies
p(ng)+p(n+g) = 2p(n) for some g. The general
result extends both the Beurling-Helson and the
Rudin theorems; it deals with homomorphisms
of a group algebra into another group algebra
and is due to Paul Cohen (1960). Here is a nice
particular case, established by Rudin in 1958: the
group algebra of a locally compact abelian group
G is isomorphic to that of the circle group T if and
only if G = T + F , where F is a finite abelian group.
This question of homomorphism of group
algebras is linked with an apparently different
question, the characterization of idempotent measures. Here again Helson and Rudin paved the
way, and the final result was obtained by Paul
Cohen, proving a conjecture of Rudin (Cambridge
meeting, 1958): The supports of the Fourier transforms of idempotent measures (these Fourier
transforms take values 0 and 1) are the members
of the coset ring of the group G , defined as

Notices of the AMS

Photograph courtesy of Mary Ellen Rudin.

Let me start with the first paper of his mentioned

in Fourier Analysis on Groups. The title is Non
analytic functions of absolutely convergent Fourier
series, and the year was 1955 [1]. What he discovered was a positive function with an absolutely
convergent Fourier series, vanishing at 0, such that
its square root does not enjoy the same property.
It was the first result of this type, but the question
was in the air, if in different forms. The Wiener-Lvy
theorem asserts that an analytic function of a function in the Wiener algebra A(T) (that is, its Fourier
series converges absolutely) belongs to A(T). In
other words, the analytic functions operate on
A(T); that is, the convolution algebra l 1 (Z) has a
symbolic calculus consisting of analytic functions.
Can we replace the analytic functions by a wider
class? The Wiener-Lvy theorem can be translated
into Banach algebras via the theory of Gelfand. The
problem can be translated as well: which are the
functions that operate in a given Banach algebra?
Great progress was made on this question between
1955 and 1958. I proved that absolute values do not
operate on the Wiener algebra, then that functions
that operate are necessarily infinitely differentiable.
Katznelson proved in 1958 the natural conjecture:
only analytic functions operate. That occurred in a
very informal meeting in Montpellier just before
the International Congress in Edinburgh; besides
Katznelson and me, Helson, Herz, Rudin, Salem,
and others were there, enjoying life and discussing
mathematics. Katznelsons theorem immediately
had several versions, involving locally compact
abelian groups instead of T. Walter was interested
in convolution algebras of measures or, what is the
same, in multiplicative algebras of Fourier-Stieltjes
transforms. What we proved in [2] is that only
entire functions operate. It is a way to recover
many previous results, going back to the WienerPitt phenomenon (the inverse of a Fourier-Stieltjes
transform is not necessarily a Fourier-Stieltjes
transform, even when it is bounded), through the
discoveries of Schreider in 1950 about the algebra
of Fourier-Stieltjes transforms. Our results were
published in the form of a series of notes in the
Comptes Rendus, but Walter was incredibly efficient
in making them known among mathematicians: the
invited report he made at the Cambridge meeting
of the AMS in August 1958, Measure Algebras on
Abelian Groups, contained them all. In the general
form about locally compact abelian groups they
are exposed in Fourier Analysis on Groups.
Walters last contribution to the subject [3] was
an extension of Katznelsons theorem, A strong
converse of the Wiener-Lvy theorem in 1962:
if, for each given f in A(G) with values in the
interval (1, 1), the composed function F (f ) is
a Fourier transform of a function which belongs

297

Photos courtesy of Mary Ellen Rudin.

298

generated by all
cosets of subgroups of G by
means of complementation and
finite intersection.
There are a
number of other
results of Rudin
in Fourier analysis,
about
factorization in L1 (Rn ), laRudin with Jaap Korvaar. cunary sequences,
thin sets, weak
almost
periodic
functions,
positive definite sequences, and absolutely monotonic
functions (another
example of operating functions). I
shall restrict myself to lacunary
sequences and thin
sets; the name of
Rudin is attached
to some of them.
Rudin with Lipman Bers. The name of Rudin
appears frequently in relation to automatic sequences and their role in Fourier series; I shall
explain the use of Rudin-Shapiro sequences.
Though lacunary sequences and thin sets can
be considered in general groups, let me restrict
myself to the integers and the circle.
In 1957 Walter defined the Paley sequences
as sequences (n(k)) such that the coefficients of
order n(k) of a function of the Hardy class H 1
(the subspace of L1 (T) generated by the imaginary
exponentials with positive frequencies) belong
to l 2 . The theorem of Paley is that Hadamard
sequences (meaning n(k + 1)/n(k) > q > 1) are
Paley. Obviously this extends to finite unions of
Hadamard sequences. The theorem of Rudin is
that it is a characterization of Paley sequences.
The Sidon sets have very many definitions, and
they were studied by Rudin in the important paper
of 1960 Trigonometric series with gaps [6]. He
introduced the (p) sets, E, defined by the fact that
the Lp norm of a trigonometric polynomial whose
frequencies lie in E are dominated by the Ls norms
for an s < p, up to a constant factor depending on
s. He studied the relation between Sidon sets and
(p) sets, proved an inequality saying that a Sidon
set is a (p) set for all values of p, and conjectured
that this inequality was optimal. This is the case, as
proved by Pisier in 1978 using Gaussian processes.
Though much is known now about Sidon sets,

the main conjecture is still unsolved; it says that

Sidon sets are nothing but a finite union of quasiindependent sets, quasi-independent meaning that
there is no linear relation with coefficients 1, 1,
or 0 between its elements. Sidon sets are still a
subject of interest, and the subject, including the
name of Sidon sets, was introduced by Rudin.
A question was raised by Rudin on the (p) sets:
There is a natural inclusion between the collections
of (p) sets, since every (p) is (q) when q < p.
Is this inclusion strict? The answer is negative for
indices < 2: all (p) are the same for 1 < p < 2.
When p is an even integer > 2, Rudin exhibited
a (p) set that is not (p0 ) for any p0 > p. Only
in 1989 was Bourgain able to extend this to all
p > 2; therefore, the inclusion is strict for p > 2.
The situation for p = 2 is not yet settled.
The Rudin sets on R or T are independent sets
over the rationals which carry measures whose
Fourier transform tends to 0 at infinity. Because of
the Kronecker theorem, this cannot happen with
countable sets. They are thin, but not too thin. The
construction of Rudin is clever (1960). It can be
replaced by a random construction. I believe that I
am responsible for the name of Rudin sets.
I may be responsible also for the name of the
Rudin-Shapiro sequence. The description and the
history are well described in the article [7] of Walter
Rudin, Some theorems on Fourier coefficients of
1959. It is a beautiful and very useful automatic
sequence, and I used it as soon as Walter told me
about it. It answered a question asked by Raphal
Salem in our informal Montpellier meeting. Salem
had overlooked the fact that Harold Shapiro had
already answered the question already in 1951.
Shapiro deserves recognition, and a few colleagues
would prefer to change the name to Shapiro-Rudin.
Likely it is too late. There are abuses of that sort in
all parts of mathematics, and they usually benefit
strong and well-known mathematicians.
The name of Rudin will stay in the history of
mathematics by the importance of his contributions
to many parts of analysis and by his exceptional
talent for exposition, in his articles as well as in
his books. Fourier analysis corresponds to part
of his life, but only to a part. His whole life as a
mathematician and as a human being deserves to
be known.

References
[1] Walter Rudin, Nonanalytic functions of absolutely
convergent Fourier series, Proc. Nat. Acad. Sci. USA 41
(1955), 238240.
[2] Jean-Pierre Kahane and Walter Rudin, Caractrisation des fonctions qui oprent sur les coefficients
de Fourier-Stieltjes, C. R. Acad. Sci. Paris 274 (1958),
773775.
[3] Walter Rudin, A strong converse of the Wiener-Levy
theorem, Canad. J. Math. 14 (1962), 694701.

Notices of the AMS

Volume 60, Number 3

, Closed ideals in group algebras, Bull. Amer.

Math. Soc. 66 (1960), 8183.
[5]
, The automorphisms and the endomorphisms
of the group algebra of the unit circle, Acta Math. 95
(1956), 3955.
, Trigonometric series with gaps, J. Math. Mech.
[6]
9 (1960), 203227.
[7]
, Some theorems on Fourier coefficients, Proc.
Amer. Math. Soc. 10 (1959), 855859.

Jean-Pierre Rosay
I came to Madison for a one-year visit in 1986 with
the hope of working with Walter. I admired Walters
work in several complex variables. I especially liked
his book Function Theory on the Unit Ball in Cn ,
a stimulating book of supreme elegance where
originality is to be found in the least details.
Our collaboration soon began. Working with
Walter was pure enjoyment, with daily exchanges.
He always came with challenges that gave rise to
an immediate desire to work. That cannot surprise
readers of his books. Nothing was rushed. Pieces
were kept, without any rushing to premature global
writing, and at the end the last pleasure was the
magic of his elegant writing (not simply cut and
paste!).
As soon as I arrived in Madison, I noticed
a very special quality of life in the mathematics
department. It is obvious that Mary Ellen and Walter
Rudin contributed largely to the atmosphere, and
they have been wonderful hosts for many. When
unexpectedly (the move was never planned) I was
invited to stay at Madison, I quickly accepted. Walter
was the main reason, but having great colleagues
around Walter, such as P. Ahern, A. Nagel, and
S. Wainger also played a role. In addition to a
collaboration with Walter, a true friendship with
Mary Ellen and Walter developed.

Edgar Lee Stout

Walter Rudin and Several Complex Variables.
The Beginning
Although Walter Rudin began his mathematical
career with work in Euclidean harmonic analysis
in a thesis on uniqueness problems concerning
Laplace series, from very early on he also pursued
investigations in complex analysis. Most of his
work in complex analysis until the early 1960s was
concerned with one-dimensional theory.
Rudins main work in several complex variables
began in the early 1960s after the publication of
Jean-Pierre Rosay is emeritus professor of mathematics at
the University of Wisconsin-Madison, retired in Anchorage.
His email address is jrosay@sbcglobal.net.

March 2013

his book Fourier

Analysis
on
Groups. I was
present at this
beginning and
recall it rather
clearly. During
the academic
year 196364 a
working seminar dedicated
to trying to
learn
something about the Mary Ellen and Walter Rudin, 1991.
then not-widelyknown subject of several complex variables was
run in Madison by a group of students and
some faculty members, including Walter. It was
a question of the blind leading the blind. The
volume of Fuks [1] had just appeared in an English
translation published by the AMS, so we in the
seminar set out to read through it systematically,
but before long we recognized that this was not
really what was desired. About that time someone
found the beautiful Tata lectures [2] of Malgrange
which give a concise introduction to the modern
theory of higher-dimensional complex analysis,
including the important notions of coherent
analytic sheaves and the associated fundamental
Theorems A and B of Cartan and Serre. The
seminar turned to these notes and became a great
success.
Walters principal research efforts soon turned
to multivariate complex analysis. Not unnaturally,
his efforts in this direction began with some
function-theoretic questions on the unit polydisc
in Cn , which is the n-fold Cartesian product
of the unit disc in the plane with itself. For a
classically trained analyst who is approaching
multidimensional complex analysis for the first
time, it is entirely natural to begin by studying
the possible extensions of classical results on the
unit disc in the plane to analogous results on the
polydisc. One soon realizes that some classical
results have direct and often easy analogues on the
polydisc and that the analogues of some classical
results are simply false. The most interesting kinds
of results are those that present new phenomena.
The first paper of Rudins about function theory
on the polydisc [5] was written jointly with me and
comprises two rather disparate kinds of results.
The first is a characterization of the rational inner
functions on the polydisc, i.e., the rational functions
of n complex variables that are holomorphic
on the polydisc and that are unimodular on
the distinguished boundary Tn (which is the
Cartesian product of n copies of the unit circle
in the plane). These are natural n-dimensional

Notices of the AMS

Photo by Yvonne Nagel.

[4]

299

Photos by Yvonne Nagel.

300

analogues of the
finite
Blaschke
products. The second kind of result
the paper contains
concerns the extension to the polydisc of the RudinCarleson Theorem,
which characterWith John-Eric Fornaess. izes as the closed
subsets of length
zero of the unit
circle the peakinterpolation sets
for the disc algebra, that is, the
sets on which
every continuous
function can be
matched by a function continuous on
Rudin and Pat Ahern, who wrote eight the closed unit
joint papers. disc and holomorphic on its interior.
This paper contains some examples of peakinterpolation sets in the torus Tn and was the first
paper to address the question of this kind of interpolation in n dimensions. In spite of considerable
subsequent work, there is still no characterization
of the peak-interpolation sets for the polydisc or
for any other domain in Cn with n > 1.
After this paper was written, Rudin continued
to think about function theory on the polydisc
and published in 1969 his book Function Theory in
Polydiscs, which contained many results obtained
in the preceding few years by him and others. The
book contains the foundations of Hardy space
theory on the polydisc; a discussion of the zero
sets of bounded holomorphic functions and, more
generally, of functions of the Hardy class; the
theory of peak-interpolation sets; and a discussion
of inner functions. All of these subjects are direct
analogues of well-understood topics in classical
function theory, but to this day not one of them
exhibits the refined completion enjoyed by the
classical theory.
About the time the polydisc book was published,
Rudins attention turned to function theory on the
unit ball in Cn . This is a considerably different
subject from analysis on polydiscs, in good measure because of the greater degree of symmetry
on the ball. Analysis on the ball is a rich subject in
itself and also serves as a model for analysis on
the general strictly pseudoconvex convex domain.
Walter published in 1980 in Springers Grundlehren
series his Function Theory on the Unit Ball of Cn ,
which is much longer than the polydisc book.

There is some overlap in themes, e.g., inner functions, peak-interpolation sets, H p -theory, zero-set
problems. At the time this book was written, it
was not at all clear that any nonconstant inner
functionsbounded holomorphic functions with
radial limits almost everywhere of modulus one
exist on the ball. The book contains several results
of the general sort that a nonconstant inner function on the ball must behave in very complicated
ways, but it neither proves nor disproves their
existence. It was eventually shown by Alexandroff
and by Hakim-Sibony-Lw that nonconstant inner
functions do exist. It is curious that although inner
functions on the disc play a fundamental role
in many function-theoretic considerations, so far
those on the ball have not found many applications.
When it appeared, this book gave a panoramic view
of almost the entire known theory of functions
on the ball, and it has served as the standard
reference since.
Walters interests were much broader than
suggested so far. For example, in [3] he gives a
characterization of the algebraic varieties in Cn ,
and in [4] he obtains the structure of a proper
holomorphic map from the ball in Cn to a domain
in Cn . He also gave two series of CBMS lectures,
the first on the edge-of-the-wedge theorem, the
second on constructions of functions on the ball.
Both were very well received.
Quite aside from the breadth and depth of his
research efforts, one must notice the clarity and
elegance of Walters expository work. His style is
concise yet clear and can well serve as a model of
mathematical exposition.
I count myself very fortunate to have been
a student of Walter Rudin, first in a wonderful
year-long course in complex variableshis Real
and Complex Analysis had not yet appearedand
subsequently as a doctoral student. While I studied
with him for my doctorate, Walter was always very
helpful, always ready with a technical suggestion
about some point under consideration, and, more
importantly always very encouraging, which is
essential for beginning students. He and his wife,
Mary Ellen, herself a distinguished mathematician,
were very generous with their hospitality, both to
their students and to their former students. What
a pleasure it has been to enjoy their friendship
over the last half-century.

References
[1] B. A. Fuks, Theory of Analytic Functions of Several
Complex Variables, translated by A. A. Brown, J. M. Danskin, and E. Hewitt, American Mathematical Society,
Providence, RI, 1963.
[2] B. Malgrange, Lectures on the Theory of Functions
of Several Complex Variables, volume 13 of Tata
Institute of Fundamental Research Lectures on Mathematics and Physics. Distributed for the Tata Institute

Notices of the AMS

Volume 60, Number 3

of Fundamental Research, Bombay, 1962. Notes by

R. Narasimhan.
[3] Walter Rudin, A geometric criterion for algebraic
varieties, J. Math. Mech. 17 (1967/1968), 671683.
, Proper holomorphic maps and finite reflection
[4]
groups, Indiana Univ. Math. J. 31, no. 5 (1982), 701720.
[5] Walter Rudin and E. L. Stout, Boundary properties of
functions of several complex variables, J. Math. Mech.
14 (1965), 9911005.

John Wermer
Walter Rudin has made important contributions
to a very wide range of problems in analysis. Of
special interest to me is some of Walters work
on problems linking the theory of commutative
Banach algebras and complex function theory.
The following question was raised by Isadore
Singer in the 1950s. The disk algebra A = A(D)
is the algebra of continuous complex-valued functions on the
 closure D of the open unit disk
D = {z C  |z| < 1} which are holomorphic on
the open disk. Singer asked, to what extent is A(D)
characterized by the following two properties:
(1) A is an algebra of functions continuous on the
closed unit disk,
(2) the maximum principle holds with respect to
the boundary of the disk.
Walter proved the following theorem: Suppose that
B is an algebra of continuous functions on the disk
such that
(i) the function f (z) = z lies in B;
(ii) for every function f in B and every point
z0 D,

|f (z0 )| max{|f (w )|  |w | = 1
so w belongs to the boundary of the disk}.
Then B is the disk algebra.
He gave extensions of this result, using the local
maximum principle and replacing the disk by other
domains, in [1].
Walters work was influential in stimulating the
development of the theory of function algebras.
In the study of polynomial approximation in Cn ,
one asks, let K be a compact set in Cn and let P(K)
denote the uniform closure on K of polynomials in
the complex coordinates. When is P (K) = C(K)?
In 1926 J. L. Walsh proved (in Math. Ann. 96) that
for each continuous arc J in the complex plane,
P (J) = C(J). In [2] Walter gave a counterexample
to the corresponding statement in C2 .
For each commutative Banach algebra, one
would like to identify all the closed ideals. This is
usually difficult. Using results of Beurling on the
invariant closed subspaces on H 2 , Walter solved

the corresponding problem for the disk algebra in

his paper [3].
A smooth manifold in Cn is called totally real
if no tangent space at a point of M contains a
complex line (e.g., Rn is totally real in Cn ). Totally
real submanifolds play an important role in the
complex geometry of Cn . Walter studied totally
real embeddings of the 3-sphere in C3 jointly with
Pat Ahern in [4], and totally real embeddings of
the Klein bottle in C2 in [5].
Walter is well known in the mathematical world
for his many basic textbooks, some of which are:
Functional Analysis. Second Edition, McGraw Hill (1991)
Real and Complex Analysis. Third Edition,
McGraw Hill (1987)
Function Theory of the Unit Ball of Cn ,
Springer Verlag (1980)
Principles of Mathematical Analysis. Third
Edition, McGraw Hill (1976)
Function Theory in Polydiscs, W. A. Benjamin (1969)
I own several of them and have found them
excellent and of great value.
Walter Rudin has contributed to so many
subjects that the above has touched on only a
small part of his work.
One nonmathematical book of Walters is his
autobiography, The Way I Remember It, published
by the American Mathematical Society. I found it
of particular interest, since Walter and I are fellow
refugees from Nazi-occupied Vienna in the late
thirties, and so his fascinating story was of special
concern to me. I remember one line from him. It
was oral and may not be in the book. Walter said,
During the war, I served in the British Army. After
that, nothing ever bothered me....

References
[1] Walter Rudin, Analyticity, and the maximum modulus
principle, Duke Math. J. 20 (1953), 449457.
, Subalgebras of spaces of continuous functions,
[2]
Proc. Amer. Math. Soc. 7 (1956), 825830.
[3]
, The closed ideals in an algebra of analytic
functions, Canad. J. Math. 9 (1957), 426434.
[4] Walter Rudin and Patrick Ahern, Totally real embeddings of S 3 in C3 , Proc. Amer. Math. Soc. 94 (1985),
460462.
[5]
, Totally real Klein bottles in C2 , Proc. Amer. Math.
Soc. 82 (1981), 653654.

John Wermer is emeritus professor of mathematics at Brown

University. His email address is wermer@math.brown.edu.

March 2013

Notices of the AMS

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