Brian Evan Blank is an associate professor of mathematics at Washington University in St. Louis

Washington University in St. Louis

Washington University in St. Louis is a private research university located in suburban St. Louis, Missouri. Founded in 1853, and named for George Washington, the university has students and faculty from all fifty U.S. states and more than 110 nations...

. He received his Ph.D. in 1980 at Cornell University

Cornell University

Cornell University is an Ivy League university located in Ithaca, New York, United States. It is a private land-grant university, receiving annual funding from the State of New York for certain educational missions...

, with Anthony Knapp

Anthony Knapp

Anthony W. Knapp is a mathematician at the US State University of New York, Stony Brook working on representation theory who classified the tempered representations of a semisimple Lie group.He won the Leroy P...

 as advisor. His 20th century work involved harmonic analysis

Harmonic analysis

Harmonic analysis is the branch of mathematics that studies the representation of functions or signals as the superposition of basic waves. It investigates and generalizes the notions of Fourier series and Fourier transforms...

. He has also co-authored a pair of calculus

Calculus

Calculus is a branch of mathematics focused on limits, functions, derivatives, integrals, and infinite series. This subject constitutes a major part of modern mathematics education. It has two major branches, differential calculus and integral calculus, which are related by the fundamental theorem...

 textbooks with his Washington University colleague, Steven Krantz. Titled Calculus: Single Variable and Calculus: Multivariable, the textbooks are currently used in calculus classes at Washington University. Moreover, he had many excellent PhD students, such as, Hesheng Zhao and Dashan Fan. The latter is professor of mathematics at University of Wisconsin.