Hjalmar Mellin

Robert Hjalmar Mellin (* June 19, 1854 in Tyrnävä ( parish Liminka ); † April 5, 1933 in Helsinki) was a Finnish mathematician who was known primarily developed by him Mellin transform.

Life

Mellin was the son of a clergyman. He grew up in Hämeenlinna, where he also attended the school, and then studied at the University of Helsinki. His teacher there was the mathematician Gösta Mittag-Leffler. 1881 presented a Mellin his dissertation. 1881/82 he studied in Berlin under Karl Weierstrass. From 1884 to 1891 he was a lecturer in Stockholm, where, however, he gave no lectures. He then worked as a lecturer in mathematics at the Polytechnic Institute. From 1904 to 1907 he was director of the Polytechnic Institute, and in 1908 professor. He joined in 1926 to retire. He was a co-founder of the Finnish Academy of Sciences.

His mathematical research led to the development of important Mellin transform. He studied so coherently among other gamma functions, hypergeometric functions, Dirichlet series and the Riemann ζ function. Unusually for a mathematician he wrote some critical philosophical work on the theory of relativity, the space-time concept he declined in the last years of his life. See also: Criticism of the theory of relativity.