Bill Veech's contributions to dynamical systems

Abstract

Bill Veech died suddenly on August 30, 2016 at the age of 77. He was a major figure in the development of dynamical systems in the past 50 years with fundamental contributions to topological dynamics, Interval Exchange Transformations, and more generally to the field now called Teichmüller dynamics, of which he was one of the founders. According to his obituary on the Statesboro Herald, William Austin Veech “was born on Christmas Eve in 1938 in Detroit, Michigan, and obtained his BA from Dartmouth College in 1960. He earned his Ph.D. in 1963 under the supervision of Salomon Bochner at Princeton University (with a dissertation on Almost Automorphic Functions). He joined the faculty of Rice University in 1969. He served as department chair for three years between 1982 and 1986 and held an endowed chair since 1988, Milton Brockett Porter Chair, 1988-2003; Edgar Odell Lovett Chair, since 2003.” During his career Veech authored approximately 60 papers and one book on complex analysis. All of his papers are single authored. According to his obituary “he believed in the importance of developing one’s own unique perspective”. Any reader of his papers might add that he also had his own personal, idiosyncratic writing style, exacting and deep, not always easily accessible. Veech had few students, the Mathematical Genealogy Project lists five: J. Martin (Ph. D. 1971), M. Stewart (Ph. D. 1978), C. Ward (Ph. D. 1996), Y. Wu (Ph. D. 2006) and J. Fickenscher (Ph. D. 2011), all at Rice University, and we are not aware of any others. Despite the small number of students, he had broad personal influence, as he was always ready to discuss mathematics and was very generous with his time, his ideas, as well as praise and encouragement for younger researchers. He also generously gave credit to others for originating ideas and for motivating his own research, sometimes acknowledging his intellectual debt in the very title of his paper (“Boshernitzan’s criterion” [87], “Bufetov’s question” [92], . . . ). It seems only fair that several of the groundbreaking results or concepts that he introduced bear his name: in topological dynamics the Veech relation and