Biography
Horace Chandler Davis was an American-Canadian mathematician, science-fiction writer, and civil-liberties figure. Subpoenaed in 1953 and called before the House Un-American Activities Committee at its 1954 hearings in Lansing, Michigan, he — alongside University of Michigan colleagues Clement Markert and Mark Nickerson — refused to cooperate; but where the others invoked the Fifth Amendment, Davis uniquely pled the First Amendment, seeking to establish that HUAC had no right to question anyone about political belief or association. The university suspended and then fired him. Convicted of contempt of Congress, he pressed the constitutional challenge on appeal until the Supreme Court declined to hear his case in 1959, and in 1960 he served a six-month sentence in the federal prison at Danbury, Connecticut — where he kept doing mathematics, publishing a paper that carried the acknowledgment "Research supported in part by the Federal Prison System." Blacklisted from American universities, he emigrated to Canada in 1962 and spent the rest of his career at the University of Toronto, becoming a distinguished operator theorist (the Davis–Kahan theorem bears his name), co-editor-in-chief of The Mathematical Intelligencer, and a published science-fiction author whose stories appeared in Astounding Science Fiction.
