Anthony Joseph Penico

Anthony "Tony" Joseph Penico (June 11, 1923, Philadelphia – November 19, 2011, Missouri) was an American mathematician and engineer. He is known for the Penico theorem,[1] Penico solvability, and Penico series.[2][3]

After graduating from South Philadelphia High School, Penico was awarded scholarships to the University of Pennsylvania. There he graduated in 1946 with a bachelor's degree in physics and in 1950 with a Ph.D. in mathematics.[4] His dissertation, written under the supervision of Richard D. Schafer, is entitled The Wedderburn Principal Theorem for Jordan Algebras.[5] The theorem, which generalizes a theorem of A. A. Albert, was published in the Transactions of the American Mathematical Society in 1951.[1] At the 1950 meeting of the International Congress of Mathematicians he was an approved (but not an invited) speaker.[6] In October 1969 he contributed a paper Functional-analysis identities for biadditive mappings on modules with non-associative scalars to the 668th meeting of the American Mathematical Society.[7]

After receiving his Ph.D., Penico moved with his wife to the Boston area, where he taught mathematics at Tufts College. In the mid-1950s the family moved to Northern California, where he worked as a Senior Engineering Specialist at the GTE's Research Laboratories. In the early 1960s, he became a Senior Research Mathematician at the Stanford Research Institute and also taught part-time at the University of California, Berkeley and at Stanford University. In 1966 Penico became a Professor of Mathematics at the University of Missouri–Rolla (which in 2008 was renamed the Missouri University of Science and Technology). He retired as professor emeritus in 1986.[4]

In 1948 he married Eva Yaremko (1925–2017). They had two sons, David Anthony Penico (1952–2008) and Stephen John Penico (born 1956). Anthony J. Penico died in 2011.[4]