Rudolph was born to William Franklin Rudolph and Betty Johnalou Waldner and was the middle of three sons, the others being Gregory and James. The family moved to Fort Collins when Daniel was very young. He attended Fort Collins High School where he was active in the Chemistry club, Physics club, Computer club and Flying club as well as being on the student council. Rudolph was a semi-finalist in the Westinghouse Science Talent Search. He graduated from Fort Collins High School in 1968 and matriculated at the California Institute of Technology. Rudolph attended CalTech on a Sloan Research Fellowship, and planned to major in theoretical physics. He soon changed his mind and graduated with a bachelor's degree in Mathematics in 1972. Before graduating he won Cal Tech's Bell Prize for Undergraduate Mathematics Research.
Career
Rudolph moved to Stanford University in 1972 where revolutionary work was being done on ergodic theory. He was awarded a Master of Science in 1973 and he completed his PhD under the supervision of Don Ornstein in 1975, with the title "Non-Bernoulli Behavior of the Roots of K-automorphisms". Rudolph's work in ergodic theory focused on measure theory as opposed to the functional analysis approach that dominated ergodic theory. His description of ergodic theory: From August 1975 to August 1976, Rudolph was a postdoctoral fellow at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. During this time he devised a solution to a problem in ergodic theory that had resisted solutions by Ornstein and others, entitled "When are two-point extensions of Bernoulli shifts also Bernoulli shifts?". In so doing he devised the method of "nesting" which evolved into a powerful tool. He also began his studies into varieties of orbit equivalence. He became a fellow of the Miller Institute at U.C. Berkeley from late 1976 to 1978 and was appointed assistant professor at Stanford University from 1978 to 1981. He spent part of 1979 at the University of Maryland where he studied dynamics. While at Maryland he lived at "Ergodic House" along with Bruce Kitchens, Brian Marcus and Laif Swanson and they were regularly visited by Doug Lind and Andres del Junco. In 1981 Rudolph was appointed associate professor at the University of Maryland and was awarded a Sloan Research Fellowship. This is also where he became recognised as a world leader in ergodic theory. He was appointed professor of mathematics in 1985 and was at Maryland until 2004, during which time he was chair of the graduate program and acting chair of the Department of Mathematics. In collaboration with Janet Kammeyer and others, Rudolph developed a theory of restricted orbit equivalence which unified Ornstein’s Bernoulli theory, Dye’s theorem, Kakutani equivalence, and other relations into a single framework. Rudolph spent some time away from Maryland and was a Visiting Professor at several universities including: the Pierre and Marie Curie University in 1988; the Mathematics Institute of the University of Warwick and the Nicolaus Copernicus University in Toruń in 1989; the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1991; the Université d'Aix-Marseille in 1993; and the Université de François Rabelais in Tours in 1993. Rudolph presented several lectures including at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Beijing in 2002 entitled "Applications of orbit equivalence to actions of discrete amenable groups." Rudolph and his family moved to his old home-town Fort Collins in 2005 where he was appointed to the Albert C. Yates Endowed Chair in Mathematics at Colorado State University. Here he was diagnosed with Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, a degenerative motor neuron disease. Rudolph founded and directed the SPIRAL program at Maryland, which was an intensive six-week preparation for graduate studies in mathematical sciences. This program was acknowledged by the American Mathematical Society with an award for "Mathematics Programs That Make a Difference" in 2008. As the disease progressed some physical activities became impossible but he continued to teach and do some departmental work, including supervising PhD students. Rudolph began a Math circle for middle school girls with the assistance of a middle school teacher, Martha Cranor. This was later expanded to a summer Math Circles camp, for middle school girls and boys. Rudolph died February 4, 2010 from complications resulting from the ALS. The April 2012 volume of the journal Ergodic Theory and Dynamical Systems was dedicated to him. One of his last papers was a joint work with Benjamin Weiss and Matthew Foreman in the journal Annals of Mathematics on the conjugacy equivalence relation of automorphisms.
Selected publications
Rudolph authored or co-authored more than 70 articles in the field of ergodic theory, including:
He also authored two books:
Personal Life
Before he got married, Rudolph had taken dance classes at as a CalTech undergraduate and at Maryland modern dancing became a serious hobby for him, after being inspired by dance innovator Alvin Mayes. In 1991, Mayes choreographed a duet "For Bill and Johnalou", dedicated to Rudolph's parents. In 1991 Rudolph married Michelle Hyde and they had three children, Beatrice, Jonah and Layton. "Rudolph was devoted to his children and evenings became a precious time to be spent with the children - no longer with friends or dance." In November 1981 Rudolph's older brother Gregory, Gregory's wife Kristin and their two children died in a plane crash. The plane had been piloted by Gregory and had crashed while attempting to land at Cedar City Airport. Rudolph was considered dynamic, inspiring and generally positive. For a while he kept a sign in his Maryland office that read "Eat problems for breakfast". His academic papers were considered difficult to read but in-person he expressed ideas elegantly. His students remembered him as "demanding but very supportive".
