Edward George Effros

Edward Effros grew up in Great Neck, New York. He finished his undergraduate study in three years at Massachusetts Institute of Technology[1] and received his Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1962. His thesis On Representations of ${\displaystyle C^{*}}$-algebras was supervised by George Mackey.[3] Effros was a postdoc at Columbia University and then became a faculty member at the University of Pennsylvania. Effros married Rita Brickman in 1967. Their two children, Rachel and Stephen, were born in Philadelphia. In 1980 Edward Effros became a full professor at the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA), and in 1979 the family relocated to Los Angeles. Rita Brickman Effros received her Ph.D. in immunology from the University of Pennsylvania. Eventually, she became a professor of pathology and laboratory medicine at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA.[1] In 2013 Edward Effros retired from UCLA as professor emeritus.[4]

He was a Guggenheim Fellow for the academic year 1982–1983.[5] In 1986 he was an invited speaker at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Berkeley, California.[6] He was the author or coauthor of over 80 publications and supervised the doctoral dissertations of 16 students,[4] including Patricia Clark Kenschaft.[3] He was elected to the 2014 Class of Fellows of the American Mathematical Society.[7]

According to Masamichi Takesaki,

Probably one can divide his mathematical achievements into the following areas:

1. His contribution, from the mid-1960s to the mid-1970s, to consolidating and expanding the “Mackey philosophy” through his work on (for example) the Effros Borel Space of von Neumann algebras on a separable Hilbert space, the Direct Disintegration of von Neumann algebras and/or representations of ${\displaystyle C^{*}}$-algebras, and the Operator Algebraic Structure Analysis of Compact Convex Sets (a significant contribution to the Choquet School) [Eff65, Eff08].
2. Nuclear C*-algebras and related topics in the mid-1970s. Among many important contributions by Ed in this area, he and his collaborator, Man-Duen Choi, proved the equivalence of the nuclearity and the approximation of the identity map by completely positive finite rank maps for a ${\displaystyle C^{*}}$-algebra [CE76a,Eff81].
3. Dimension Groups in the early 1980s, where Ed and his coauthors David E. Handelman and Chao Liang Shen gave a beautiful characterization of the dimension groups of AF ${\displaystyle C^{*}}$algebras as Riesz groups [EHS80].
4. Operator spaces and quantized functional analysis, from the mid-1980s onwards. It is my impression that Ed viewed this work as his most important contribution to mathematics, regarding it as the quantization of analysis [Eff89, Eff09, ER94].[8]

Edward's older brother, Robert Carlton Effros (born 1933), became a lawyer and member of the legal department of the International Monetary Fund. Edward's identical twin, Richard M. Effros, graduated from NYU School of Medicine and became a pulmonologist. Edward was married to Rita née Brinkman for 52 years. Their daughter Rachel Marian Effros (born 1969) became a pediatrician. Their son Stephen David Effros (born 1972) became a senior project manager for Portland Public Schools in Portland, Oregon. In June 2019 Edward and Rita relocated to Portland, but Edward died 6 months later.[1] Upon his death he was survived by his wife, daughter, son, and two granddaughters.[9]