Robert Creighton Buck

Buck was vice-president of the American Mathematical Society and the Mathematical Association of America (MAA), whose "Committee on the Undergraduate Program in Mathematics“ (CUPM) he founded and from 1959 to 1963 chaired. In 1962 he was an invited speaker (Global solutions of differential equations) at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Stockholm.

Buck was born in Cincinnati. He studied at the University of Cincinnati and then earned his PhD in 1947 at Harvard University under David Widder and Ralph Boas with dissertation Uniqueness, Interpolation and Characterization Theorems for Functions of Exponential Type. For three years he was an assistant professor at Brown University, before he became in 1950 an associate professor at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, where he was promoted to professor in 1954. In 1973, he became the acting director of the University of Wisconsin Army Mathematics Research Center when J. Barkley Rosser retired. At Madison he became in 1980 "Hilldale Professor" and from 1964 to 1966 he was chair of the mathematics department. In 1990 he retired as professor emeritus but remained mathematically active.

Robert Creighton Buck (30 August 1920 Cincinnati – 1 February 1998 Wisconsin), usually cited as R. Creighton Buck, was an American mathematician who, with Ralph Boas, introduced Boas–Buck polynomials. He taught at University of Wisconsin–Madison for 40 years. In addition, he was a writer.