Calkin received his bachelor's degree from
Columbia University in 1933 and his master's degree in 1934 and his Ph.D. in 1937 from
Harvard University. His doctoral dissertation
Applications of the Theory of Hilbert Space to Partial Differential Equations; the Self-Adjoint Transformations in Hilbert Space Associated with a Formal Partial Differential Operator of the Second Order and Elliptic Type ) was supervised by
Marshall H. Stone. In the dissertation, Calkin acknowledges useful discussions with
John von Neumann. At the
Institute for Advanced Study, Calkin was a research assistant for the academic year 1937–1938 (working with
Oswald Veblen and von Neumann) and in the first eight months of 1942. From Los Alamos, Calkin went in 1946 as a
Guggenheim Fellow to the
California Institute of Technology. He later taught at the
Rice Institute (renamed Rice University in 1960), before returning in 1949 to
Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory as a member of the theoretical division. Brant Calkin is an environmental activist in New Mexico and Utah and a former president of the
Sierra Club. ==Selected publications==