Clifford John Earle Jr.

Clifford John Earle, Jr. (November 3, 1935 – June 12, 2017) was an American mathematician who specialized in complex variables and Teichmüller spaces.

[1] He received his bachelor's degree from Swarthmore College in 1957, his master's degree from Harvard University in 1958, and his Ph.D. in 1962 under Lars Ahlfors with thesis Teichmüller Spaces of Groups of the Second Kind.

Earle's research dealt with Teichmüller spaces (i.e. moduli spaces of Riemann surfaces) and the related theories of quasiconformal mappings (following Ahlfors and Lipman Bers) and Kleinian groups.

With James Eells in 1967 he mathematically described, for any compact Riemann surface X, the homotopy types of spaces of diffeomorphisms of X and thus a new characterization of the Teichmüller space of X.

[3] In 1969 Earle and Eells extended the 1967 result to non-orientable surfaces, and in 1970 Earle and Schatz extended the 1967 result to surfaces with boundary.