Wilhelmus Luxemburg

Wilhelmus Anthonius Josephus Luxemburg (11 April 1929 – 2 October 2018) was a Dutch American mathematician who was a professor of mathematics at the California Institute of Technology.

He received his B.A. from the University of Leiden in 1950; his M.A., in 1953; his Ph.D., from the Delft Institute of Technology, in 1955. He was assistant professor at Caltech during 1958–60; Associate Professor, during 1960–62; Professor, during 1962–2000; Professor Emeritus, from 2000. He was the Executive Officer for Mathematics during 1970–85. In 2012 he became a fellow of the American Mathematical Society. Luxemburg became a corresponding member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1974.

Luxemburg contributed to the development of non-standard analysis by popularizing the construction of hyperreal numbers in the 1960s. Though Edwin Hewitt had shown the construction in 1948, the formalization of non-standard analysis is generally associated with Abraham Robinson.

Other notable work he did was in the theory of Riesz spaces (partially ordered vector spaces where the order structure is a lattice). Provided by Wikipedia