Harry Vandiver

Harry Schultz Vandiver ( born October 21, 1882 in Philadelphia, † 9 January 1973 in Austin, Texas) was an American mathematician who worked on number theory.

Although Vandiver attended some classes at the University of Pennsylvania 1904/ 05, but developed during his high school years, a school aversion and preferred to work as a broker in the company of his father, than to make a conclusion. But he taught himself mathematics and solved problems regularly ( and sent new problems a ) in the American Mathematical Monthly. In 1904, he published numerous theoretical works, among others, George Birkhoff. He also studied the works of Ernst Eduard Kummer in connection with the Fermat problem. During the First World War he worked from 1917 to 1919 in the reserve of the U.S. Navy. In 1919 he was on the recommendation and advice of Birkhoff Instructor at Cornell University - he had not the formal requirements, but already published a number of works. Summer of 1919, he also worked with Leonard Dickson in Chicago at the History of the Theory of Numbers. In 1924 he was associate professor at the University of Texas, where he was a full professor in 1925 and was held until his retirement in 1966. In 1947 he was appointed there for Distinguished Service Professor of Applied Mathematics and Astronomy. In 1952 he proved by means of computer use at the National Bureau of Standards in Los Angeles, that the Fermat problem has no solution for primes less than 2000, after he had already shown with his students and "by hand" the Applying for numbers less than 600.

In addition to his work on Fermat 's conjecture, he also worked on cyclotomic fields, factoring, reciprocity laws, finite fields, semigroups and semirings and theory of algebras.

For his work on Fermat's conjecture in 1931 he received the Cole prize. 1934/35 he was vice president of the American Mathematical Society. In 1934 he was inducted into the National Academy of Sciences. In 1946 he became an honorary doctorate from the University of Pennsylvania.

He was married in 1923 and had a son Frank Vandiver, president of the Texas A & M University was. He lived in Austin in a hotel and had a large collection of classical records.

A still open conjecture on the class number of cyclotomic bodies is named after him ( Vandiver 's conjecture that the class number of the maximal real sub- body of the cyclotomic field for prime not divisible ), but was already established by Kummer in 1849 in a letter to Leopold Kronecker.