Robert Phelps

Robert Ralph Phelps (March 22, 1926 – January 4, 2013) was an American mathematician known for his contributions to analysis, particularly functional analysis and measure theory. He served as a professor of mathematics at the University of Washington from 1962 until his passing. Phelps completed his dissertation on subreflexive Banach spaces under the guidance of Victor Klee at the University of Washington in 1958. In 2012, he was honored as a fellow of the American Mathematical Society. Phelps, who was an atheist, collaborated with Errett Bishop to prove the Bishop–Phelps theorem, a significant result in functional analysis with applications in operator theory, harmonic analysis, Choquet theory, and variational analysis.