Robert Clarke James (1918[1] – September 25, 2004)[2] was an American mathematician who worked in functional analysis.
[3] He spent a year as a Benjamin Peirce Fellow at Harvard and joined the faculty at UC Berkeley.
Later he was the founding math department chair both at Harvey Mudd College and at the Claremont Graduate University.
He also characterized reflexivity for Banach spaces with an unconditional Schauder basis and proved an eponymous compactness criterion.
[4] James was made a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 1978.