AMS Presidents: A Timeline

8. William Fogg Osgood (1864-1943)

President, 1905-1906

Osgood went to Germany from 1887-1890, and returned to Harvard at a time when there was a great revival of mathematical study in America. He taught at Harvard until he retired. His main work was on the convergence of sequences of continuous functions, solutions of differential equations, the calculus of variations and space filling curves. Osgood was a member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences.

• A Semicentennial History of the American Mathematical Society, 1888--1938 , by Raymond Clare Archibald (AMS, 1938), which contains CV, honors, bibliography, biographical notes and sources.
• The MacTutor History of Mathematics Archive
• Mathematics Genealogy Project
• A Century of Mathematics in America, Part II, Edited by Peter Duren with the assistance of Richard A. Askey and Uta C. Merzbach (American Mathematical Society, 1989), "William Fogg Osgood [Reprint]," by J.L. Walsh, p.79.