Lawrence Allen Zalcman (June 9, 1943 – May 31, 2022) was a professor (and later a professor emeritus) of Mathematics at Bar-Ilan University in Israel. His research primarily concerned Complex analysis, potential theory, and the relations of these ideas to approximation theory, harmonic analysis, integral geometry and partial differential equations.[1][2] On top of his scientific achievements, Zalcman received numerous awards for mathematical exposition, including the Chauvenet Prize[3] in 1976, the Lester R. Ford Award in 1975[3] and 1981,[4] and the Paul R. Halmos – Lester R. Ford Award in 2017.[5] In addition to Bar-Ilan University, Zalcman taught at the University of Maryland and Stanford University in the United States.[6]
Zalcman was born in Kansas City, Missouri on June 9, 1943.[6] In 1961, he graduated from Southwest High School in Kansas City, Missouri before continuing his education at Dartmouth College, where he would graduate in 1964.[6] Zalcman went on to receive his Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1968 under the supervision of Kenneth Myron Hoffman.[7] In 2012, Zalcman became a fellow of the American Mathematical Society.[8]
In the theory of normal families, Zalcman's Lemma, which he used as part of his treatment of Bloch's principle, is named after him.[9] Other eponymous honors are Zalcman domains, which play a role in the classification of Riemann surfaces, and Zalcman functions in complex dynamics. In the theory of partial differential equations, the Pizzetti-Zalcman formula is partially named after him.[10]