Wendell Fleming

Wendell Helms Fleming (March 7, 1928 – February 18, 2023) was an American mathematician specializing in geometrical analysis and stochastic differential equations.

Fleming received his PhD in 1951 under Laurence Chisholm Young at the University of Wisconsin–Madison with the thesis Boundary and Related Notions for Generalized Parametric Surfaces. Fleming was a professor at Brown University, where he retired in 2009 as professor emeritus.

Together with Herbert Federer, Fleming was a pioneer of geometric measure theory. Later in his career, he worked on stochastic processes, stochastic differential equations and their applications in control theory. From 1976 to 1977, he was a Guggenheim Fellow. In 1982 he gave a plenary address (Optimal Control of Markov Processes) at the ICM in Warsaw.