page_title: Arnold Ross
section_title: Early life and career
hierarchical_section_title: Arnold Ross / Early life and career
caption_attribution_description: English: "This is his school uniform." http://www.math.osu.edu/ross/ARossPictures/February.htm
context_page_description: Arnold Ephraim Ross was a mathematician and educator who founded the Ross Mathematics Program, a number theory summer program for gifted high school students. He was born in Chicago, but spent his youth in Odessa, Ukraine, where he studied with Samuil Shatunovsky. Ross returned to Chicago and enrolled in University of Chicago graduate coursework under E. H. Moore, despite his lack of formal academic training. He received his Ph.D. and married his wife, Bee, in 1931.
  Ross taught at several institutions including St. Louis University before becoming chair of University of Notre Dame's mathematics department in 1946. He started a teacher training program in mathematics that evolved into the Ross Mathematics Program in 1957 with the addition of high school students. The program moved with him to Ohio State University when he became their department chair in 1963. Though forced to retire in 1976, Ross ran the summer program until 2000. He had worked with over 2,000 students during more than forty summers.
  The program is known as Ross's most significant work. Its attendees have since continued on to prominent research positions across the sciences.
context_section_description: Ross was born Arnold Ephraim Chaimovich on August 24, 1906, in Chicago to Ukrainian-Jewish immigrants. He was an only child. His mother supported the family as a physical therapist. Ross returned to Odessa, Ukraine with his mother in 1909 for assistance from her extended family, and stayed once World War I and the Russian Revolution broke out. The two events led to widespread famine and economic woe in the region. Ross learned Russian at the behest of his mother, and developed a love of the theater and language. Ross's mother encouraged him to read, which he did often, and subscribed to a private library since Odessa had no public library. He credited his favorite uncle, an X-ray diagnostician, with introducing him to mathematics. The uncle had hired Samuil Shatunovsky to tutor his talented son, and Ross asked to join in. As money meant little due to inflation, Shatunovsky was paid to tutor the two boys with a pound of French hard candy. During this time, Ross was not taught with textbooks or lectured on geometric proofs. His geometry teacher would ask the class to prove and justify ideas on the blackboard per trial and error. Many universities were closed due to the famine, but Odessa University reopened and let a small group of adolescents attend, including Ross.
   Ross left Odessa—now part of the USSR—in 1922 with the intention of returning to Chicago and studying topology with E. H. Moore at the University of Chicago. After negotiating his way home, he worked at a family friend's bookbinding shop and continued to learn English at the Lewis Institute. He also changed his surname from Chaimovich to Ross in 1922. Ross used his salary from a year at the shop to enroll for one term at the University of Chicago in Moore's course. Moore gave Ross special attention, knowing his untraditional background, and arranged for Ross to attend the topology class as the sole undergraduate.
  In Moore's teaching style, he would propose a conjecture and task the students with proving it. Students could respond with counter-conjectures that they would defend. Ross found Moore's method exciting, and his pedagogy influenced Ross's own. Ross graduated with a B.S. degree and continued his study as Leonard Eugene Dickson's research assistant. Ross earned a M.S. degree and finished his Ph.D. in number theory at the University of Chicago in 1931 with Dickson as his adviser. Ross's dissertation was entitled "On Representation of Integers by Indefinite Ternary Quadratic Forms".  He did not pay tuition after his first quarter, which he credits to Dickson.
  Ross married Bertha (Bee) Halley Horecker, a singer-musician and daughter of Ross's Chicago neighbors, in 1931, received a National Research Council Fellowship for 1932, and worked as a National Research Council postdoctoral fellow at California Institute of Technology with Eric Temple Bell until 1933. Ross moved back to Chicago and led the mathematics department at an experimental school started by Ph.D.s during the Great Depression, People's Junior College, where he also taught physics. Ross became an assistant professor at St. Louis University in 1935 and stayed for about 11 years. In an interview, he said he advocated for a student who became the first black woman in the South to receive a master's degree in mathematics. This exception led the university to admit black students despite the idea's widespread unpopularity. During World War II, Ross served as a research mathematician for the U.S. Navy. He befriended Hungarian mathematician Gábor Szegő while in St. Louis, who recommended Ross for a 1941 Brown University summer school that prepared young scientists to assist in the war, a program Ross attended. He occasionally worked on proximity fuzes for Stromberg-Carlson's laboratory from 1941 to 1945 before accepting a position as head of University of Notre Dame's mathematics department in 1946. He set out to change the school's research climate by inviting distinguished mathematicians including Paul Erdős, whom Ross made a full professor.
caption: Ross as young boy in school uniform
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