Hedrick was born in
Union City,
Indiana. After undergraduate work at the
University of Michigan, he obtained a Master of Arts from
Harvard University. With a Parker fellowship, he went to Europe and obtained his PhD from
Göttingen University in Germany under the supervision of
David Hilbert in 1901. He then spent several months at the
École Normale Supérieure in France, where he became acquainted with
Édouard Goursat,
Jacques Hadamard,
Jules Tannery,
Émile Picard and
Paul Émile Appell, before becoming an instructor at
Yale University. In 1903, he became professor at the
University of Missouri. He moved in 1920 to the
University of California, Los Angeles to become head of the department of mathematics. In 1933, he was giving the first graduate lecture on mathematics at UCLA. He became
provost and vice-president of the
University of California in 1937. He humorously called his appointment
The Accident, and told jokingly after this event, "I no longer have any intellectual interests —I just sit and talk to people." He played in fact a very important role in making of the University of California a leading institution. He retired from the UCLA faculty in 1942 and accepted a visiting professorship at
Brown University. Soon after the beginning of this new appointment, he suffered a lung infection. He died at the
Rhode Island Hospital in
Providence,
Rhode Island. Two UCLA residence halls have been named after him: Hedrick Hall in 1963, and Hedrick Summit in 2005. == Research ==