Morgan Ward was an American mathematician, a professor of mathematics

Mathematics

Mathematics is the study of quantity, space, structure, and change. Mathematicians seek out patterns and formulate new conjectures. Mathematicians resolve the truth or falsity of conjectures by mathematical proofs, which are arguments sufficient to convince other mathematicians of their validity...

 at the California Institute of Technology

California Institute of Technology

The California Institute of Technology is a private research university located in Pasadena, California, United States. Caltech has six academic divisions with strong emphases on science and engineering...

.

Ward received his Ph.D. from Caltech in 1928, with a dissertation entitled The Foundations of General Arithmetic; his advisor was Eric Temple Bell

Eric Temple Bell

Eric Temple Bell , was a mathematician and science fiction author born in Scotland who lived in the U.S. for most of his life...

. He became a research fellow at Caltech, and then in 1929 a member of the faculty; he remained at Caltech until his death in 1963. Among his doctoral students was Robert P. Dilworth

Robert P. Dilworth

Robert Palmer Dilworth was an American mathematician. His primary research area was lattice theory; his biography at the MacTutor History of Mathematics archive states "it would not be an exaggeration to say that he was one of the main factors in the subject moving from being merely a tool of...

, who also became a Caltech professor. Ward is the academic ancestor

Academic genealogy

An academic, or scientific, genealogy, organizes a family tree of scientists and scholars according to dissertation supervision relationships....

 of over 500 mathematicians and computer scientists through Dilworth and another of his students, Donald Darling.

Ward's research interests included the study of recurrence relation

Recurrence relation

In mathematics, a recurrence relation is an equation that recursively defines a sequence, once one or more initial terms are given: each further term of the sequence is defined as a function of the preceding terms....

s and the divisibility properties of their solutions, diophantine equation

Diophantine equation

In mathematics, a Diophantine equation is an indeterminate polynomial equation that allows the variables to be integers only. Diophantine problems have fewer equations than unknown variables and involve finding integers that work correctly for all equations...

s including Euler's sum of powers conjecture and equations between monomial

Monomial

In mathematics, in the context of polynomials, the word monomial can have one of two different meanings:*The first is a product of powers of variables, or formally any value obtained by finitely many multiplications of a variable. If only a single variable x is considered, this means that any...

s, abstract algebra

Abstract algebra

Abstract algebra is the subject area of mathematics that studies algebraic structures, such as groups, rings, fields, modules, vector spaces, and algebras...

, lattice theory and residuated lattice

Residuated lattice

In abstract algebra, a residuated lattice is an algebraic structure that is simultaneously a lattice x ≤ y and a monoid x•y which admits operations x\z and z/y loosely analogous to division or implication when x•y is viewed as multiplication or conjunction respectively...

s, functional equation

Functional equation

In mathematics, a functional equation is any equation that specifies a function in implicit form.Often, the equation relates the value of a function at some point with its values at other points. For instance, properties of functions can be determined by considering the types of functional...

s and functional iteration

Iterated function

In mathematics, an iterated function is a function which is composed with itself, possibly ad infinitum, in a process called iteration. In this process, starting from some initial value, the result of applying a given function is fed again in the function as input, and this process is repeated...

, and numerical analysis

Numerical analysis

Numerical analysis is the study of algorithms that use numerical approximation for the problems of mathematical analysis ....

. He also worked with the National Science Foundation

National Science Foundation

The National Science Foundation is a United States government agency that supports fundamental research and education in all the non-medical fields of science and engineering. Its medical counterpart is the National Institutes of Health...

 on the reform of the elementary school mathematics curriculum, and with Clarence Ethel Hardgrove he wrote the textbook Modern Elementary Mathematics (Addison-Wesley, 1962).

Ward's works are collected in the Caltech library. A symposium

Symposium

In ancient Greece, the symposium was a drinking party. Literary works that describe or take place at a symposium include two Socratic dialogues, Plato's Symposium and Xenophon's Symposium, as well as a number of Greek poems such as the elegies of Theognis of Megara...

in his memory was held at Caltech on November 21-22, 1963.