John Williams Calkin

[3] At the Institute for Advanced Study, Calkin was a research assistant for the academic year 1937–1938 (working with Oswald Veblen and von Neumann) and in the first eight months of 1942.

During the late 1930s and early 1940s he wrote several important papers on operator theory and its applications to partial differential equations.

[5] During World War II Calkin was part of a mine warfare operations analysis group with J.L.

Von Neumann and Calkin worked on shock waves and damage by explosives; they were sent to England to learn of the progress under way there.

In 1958, he accepted a consulting appointment at New York University and at Brookhaven National Laboratory and, in 1961, was named head, and then chairman of the Applied Mathematics Department.