During my formative years as an assistant professor at MU in the late 1970s, I often ate lunch with Professors Jerry Lange and Ernest Roetman. It was at that time that Jerry first told me that he had heard Professor Leonard Blumenthal and other old-timers tell him that celebrated mathematicians such as Oliver Kellogg, G.A. Bliss and Earle Hedrick had once taught at MU.
I forgot all about this as I rose through the ranks at Ole Mizzou and relocated to the University of Florida in 1987 as senior professor in differential geometry.
In the early 1990s, I hesitatingly volunteered to be editor of the UF department newsletter, and after a year or so, I had the idea for an alumni news column.
A trip to the University of Florida science library proved conclusively that both Kellogg and Hedrick had been at MU and had collaborated on a series of textbooks.
In those days, a department would just have a single professor who served also as chair. I saw from the title pages of those books that Hedrick was the professor and Kellogg assistant professor. Indeed, I found the book Applications of Calculus to Mechanics by Hedrick, which listed him as professor of mathematics at MU and Kellogg as MU assistant professor. Ginn and Company published the book in 1909.
The preface to this book contained a paragraph about pedagogical issues of teaching mathematics to students who must apply the material in professions such as engineering, and it used MU as an example.
University archives revealed that Earle Raymond Hedrick had taken the PhD at Gottingen in 1901 after undergraduate work at Michigan and graduate studies at Harvard. After a semester at the Ecole Normale in Paris, Hedrick obtained a position as mathematics instructor in the graduate science division at Yale. In 1903, he came to MU as professor and chair of mathematics.
The April 16, 1906, report of the University of Missouri Board of Curators confirmed the recollections of those now-departed MU faculty members who set me on this trail: “In the summer of 1905, G.A. Bliss, assistant professor of mathematics, resigned to accept a position at Princeton. Oliver D. Kellogg has been elected as his successor. Louis Ingold, instructor of mathematics, has been granted a year’s leave of absence. This, together with the large enrollment in mathematics, has made it necessary to appoint two additional instructors in that subject. R.L. Borger and W.D.A. Westfall have been appointed.”
The 1906 record also reveals that Oliver Dimon Kellogg had taken his earlier work at Princeton, then obtained his PhD in Gottingen in 1902, a year later than Hedrick; but these two men must have met in Gottingen.
Also, Hedrick would have become acquainted with Westfall when they were both at Yale.
So Hedrick, lucky enough to finish before Kellogg, would obtain the sole mathematics professorship at MU in 1903; Kellogg would have to wait until 1905 when the sole assistant professorship at MU was open. He served as an instructor at Princeton before joining Hedrick on the faculty that built up American mathematics education in the Midwest. He stayed at Mizzou for about 15 years, leaving to take a professorship at Harvard in 1919 when he was about 40 years old. Hedrick would continue his service at MU until his move to UCLA in 1924.
How sad that the name Hedrick is associated with California through the Hedrick Assistant Professorships at UCLA and Kellogg is known for having been a Harvard professor and a pioneer researcher in potential theory, but neither man is commemorated for his pioneering work in graduate and undergraduate education at Ole Mizzou during the first quarter of the 20th century.