Isaac Namioka (April 25, 1928-September 25, 2019) was a Japanese-American mathematician who worked in general topology and functional analysis. He was born in Tōno, Japan. He attended Ottawa University in Ottawa, Kansas to receive an BA in Mathematics in 1951, then attended the University of Kansas to receive an MA in Mathematics in 1953. He received a PhD in Mathematics from the University of California, Berkely, in 1956 with the dissertation "On Partially Ordered Linear Topological Spaces" under the supervision of John L. Kelley. As a graduate student, Namioka married Chinese-American mathematics student Lensey Namioka.
He was an instructor at Cornell starting in 1957, then moved to the University of Washington in 1963 where he became an Emeritus Professor in 1996. Namioka had visiting positions at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey (1962-1963), Research Institute for Mathematical Sciences in Kyoto, Japan (1968-1969), the University of Warwick (1975-1976), and University College London (1985-1986). Namioka, along with other University of Washington mathematicians, published under the collective pseudonym of the fictitious mathematician "John Rainwater."
Source: Biographical materials in collection, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isaac_Namioka
John Rainwater was the fictitious mathematician created as a student prank at the University of Washington. In 1952, John Rainwater was invented and enrolled in a mathematics course by graduate students who were in possession of a duplicate student-registration form. Starting in 1959 mathematicians published under the pseudonym of John Rainwater. These included John R. Isbell, Robert R. Phelps, Peter D. Morris, Isaac Namioka, David Preiss, Irving Glicksberg, Edgar Asplund, and others. Papers were published under the name Rainwater mainly in functional analysis, particularly in the geometric theory of Banach spaces and in convex functions. Rainwater's theorem is an important result in summability theory and functional analysis. The University of Washington's seminar in functional analysis is called the Rainwater seminar, and the associated Rainwater notes have influenced Banach-space theory and convex analysis.
Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Rainwater
Correspondence, notebooks and notes, course materials including draft exams and homework, syllabi, papers by Namioka including some with notes, reviews, research materials including papers by others, conference materials, and other materials from the career of a University of Washington professor of Mathematics. Includes John Rainwater publications and materials related to the Rainwater Seminars.
No restrictions on access.
Creator's copyrights transferred to the University of Washington Libraries Special Collections.
Aki Namioka (daughter), 2021
Includes professional correspondence and a letter with remembrances of childhood, family, and April Fool's events at Universities in Kansas
Includes the "Proceedings of the Hewittfest"
Includes notes and drafts
Includes "Linear Topological Spaces" with drafts, proofs, and notes
Papers sometimes with notes or correspondence, organized by author's last name
Includes correspondence with Warren Moors
Some include notes or correspondence. Includes papers sent to Namioka for review.
Consists of "Chapter 7: Generalized metric spaces and metrization" by Gary Gruenhage from Recent Progress in General Topology, "On the structure of non-dentable closed bounded convex sets" by Haskell Rosenthal, and "On an inequality of A. Grothendieck concerning operators on L¹" by Haskell Rosenthal
Includes papers sent to Namioka for review with notes and related materials
Includes draft exams and homework, lecture notes, syllabi, and other materials
Includes papers and material related to John Rainwater Seminars
Includes papers from the Rainwater-Fourier Seminar (1977)