McGehee, Richard

Richard Paul McGehee (born 20 September 1943 in San Diego) is an American mathematician, who works on dynamical systems with special emphasis on celestial mechanics. McGehee received from Caltech in 1964 his bachelor's degree and from University of Wisconsin–Madison in 1965 his master's degree and in 1969 his Ph.D. under Charles C. Conley with thesis Homoclinic orbits in the restricted three body problem. As a postdoc he was at the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences of New York University. In 1970, he became an assistant professor and in 1979 a full professor at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis, where he was from 1994 to 1998 the director of the Center for the Computation and Visualization of Geometric Structures. He has been at the University of Minnesota since 1970. In the 1970s, he introduced a coordinate transformation (now known as the McGehee transformation) which he used to regularize singularities arising in the Newtonian three-body problem. In 1975, he, with John N. Mather, proved that for the Newtonian collinear four-body problem there exist solutions which become unbounded in a finite time interval. In 1978, he was an Invited Speaker on the subject of Singularities in classical celestial mechanics at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Helsinki.