Gilbert Ames Bliss, (9 May 1876 – 8 May 1951), was an American mathematician, known for his work on the calculus of variations. Life Bliss grew up in a Chicago family that eventually became affluent; in 1907, his father became president of the company supplying all of Chicago's electricity. The family was not affluent, however, when Bliss entered the University of Chicago in 1893 (its second year of operation). Hence he had to support himself while a student by winning a scholarship, and by playing in a student professional mandolin quartet. After obtaining the B.Sc. in 1897, he began graduate studies at Chicago in mathematical astronomy (his first publication was in that field), switching in 1898 to mathematics. He discovered his life's work, the calculus of variations, via the lecture notes of Weierstrass's 1879 course, and Bolza's teaching. Bolza went on to supervise Bliss's Ph.D. thesis, The Geodesic Lines on the Anchor Ring, completed in 1900 and published in the Annals of Mathematics in 1902. After two years as an instructor at the University of Minnesota, Bliss spent the 1902–03 academic year at the University of Göttingen, interacting with Felix Klein, David Hilbert, Hermann Minkowski, Ernst Zermelo, Erhard Schmidt, Max Abraham, and Constantin Carathéodory. Upon returning to the United States, Bliss taught one year each at the University of Chicago and the University of Missouri. In 1904, he published two more papers on the calculus of variations in the Transactions of the American Mathematical Society. Bliss was a Preceptor at Princeton University, 1905–08, joining a strong group of young mathematicians that included Luther P. Eisenhart, Oswald Veblen, and Robert Lee Moore. While at Princeton he was also an associate editor of the Annals of Mathematics. In 1908, Chicago's Maschke died and Bliss was hired to replace him; Bliss remained at Chicago until his 1941 retirement. While at Chicago, he was an editor of the Transactions of the American Mathematical Society, 1908–16, and chaired the Mathematics Department, 1927–41. That Department was less distinguished under Bliss than it had been under E. H. Moore's previous leadership, and than it would become under Marshall Stone's and Saunders MacLane's direction after World War II. A near-contemporary of Bliss's at Chicago was the algebraist Leonard Dickson. During World War I, he worked on ballistics, designing new firing tables for artillery, and lectured on navigation. In 1918, he and Oswald Veblen worked together in the Range