David J. Foulis

David James Foulis is an American mathematician known for his research on the algebraic foundations of quantum mechanics. He is a professor emeritus at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, and is the namesake of Foulis semigroups, an algebraic structure that he studied extensively under the alternative name of Baer *-semigroups.

Foulis was born on July 26, 1930 in Hinsdale, Illinois, the son of professional golfer Jim Foulis. As a teenager he moved with his family to Florida, and he graduated magna cum laude from the University of Miami with a degree in physics in 1952. He stayed at Miami for a master's degree in mathematics in 1953. He spent the following year as a graduate student at Tulane University, and then visited the University of Chicago for two years with Irving Kaplansky and Paul Halmos as mentors. Returning to Tulane, he completed his Ph.D. in 1958 under the supervision of one of Kaplansky's students, Fred Boyer Wright, Jr.

After completing his doctorate, Foulis taught for one year in the mathematics department at Lehigh University, four years at Wayne State University, and two years at the University of Florida before moving to the University of Massachusetts as a professor of mathematics and statistics in 1965. He retired in 1997, but has continued to be active as a researcher after retirement.

Foulis's doctoral students at Massachusetts have included DIMACS associate director Melvin Janowitz and graph theorist David Sumner.

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