Hedlund was born May 7, 1904, in Somerville, Massachusetts. He did his undergraduate studies at Harvard University, earned a master's degree from Columbia University, and returned to Harvard for his doctoral studies. He was a student of Marston Morse, under whose supervision he received a Ph.D. in 1930 with thesis entitled "I. Geodesics on a Two-Dimensional Riemannian Manifold with Periodic Coefficients II. Poincare's Rotation Number and Morse's Type Number".[1][2][3][4]
One of Hedlund's early results was an important theorem about the ergodicityofgeodesic flows.[7] He also made significant contributions to symbolic dynamics, whose origins as a field of modern mathematics can be traced to a 1944 paper of Hedlund, and to topological dynamics.[1][2]
In 1972, a conference on topological dynamics was held to honor Hedlund on the occasion of his retirement from Yale. The editor of the festschrift from the conference, Anatole Beck, wrote that it was "our token of respect to the man who did so much to foster and build this field".[12]
^ abcBeck, Anatole, ed. (1973), "Citation read to the Faculty of Graduate School of Yale University on the occasion of Professor Hedlund's retirement", Proceedings of the Conference on Topological Dynamics held at Yale University on August 23, 1972, in honor of Professor Gustav Arnold Hedlund on the occasion of his retirement, Lecture Notes in Mathematics, Vol. 318, Berlin: Springer-Verlag, p. viii+285, MR0370654.
^Hedlund, G. A. (1969), "Endomorphisms and Automorphisms of the Shift Dynamical Systems", Mathematical Systems Theory, 3 (4): 320–375, doi:10.1007/BF01691062, S2CID21803927.
^Review of Topological Dynamics by Y. N. Dowker, MR0074810.
^Beck, Anatole, ed. (1973), Proceedings of the Conference on Topological Dynamics held at Yale University on August 23, 1972, in honor of Professor Gustav Arnold Hedlund on the occasion of his retirement, Lecture Notes in Mathematics, Vol. 318, vol. 318, Berlin: Springer-Verlag, doi:10.1007/BFb0061716, ISBN978-3-540-06187-8, MR0370654.
