Gilman, Ray E.

Ray Edwin Gilman (1887-1975), professor of mathematics, was born in Lansing, Kansas, on June 19, 1887. When he was twenty years old, he was teaching in a one-room school and also was teaching himself mathematics from the Encyclopaedia Britannica. When he ran into difficulty with self-taught calculus, a professor at the University of Kansas encouraged him to study there. After graduation in 1911, he was assistant in mathematics at Kansas State College for a year and then instructor and fellow in mathematics at Princeton, where he received a Ph.D. degree in 1916. After teaching at Cornell for a short time, he became a captain in the Coast Artillery and ballistics instructor during the First World War. After the war he worked briefly for the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company until Professor R. G. D. Richardson brought him to Brown as assistant professor in 1919. He became associate professor in 1932 and full professor in 1949. During the Second World War he was mathematical advisor to IBM and served with the Eighth Air Force in England. In 1952-53 he was scientific warfare advisor to the Joint Chiefs of Staff. He retired from Brown in 1954, but continued his teaching from 1954 to 1959 at Washington College in Maryland. He died in Providence on January 26, 1975.