Leonard Eugene Dickson

Leonard Eugene Dickson ( born January 22, 1874 in Independence, Iowa, USA, † January 17, 1954 in Harlingen, Texas, United States) was an American mathematician who worked primarily in the field of number theory and algebra.

Life and work

Dickson grew up in Cleburne, Texas, where his father was a banker and businessman. He studied at the University of Texas at Austin with William Halsted mathematics and made there in 1894 his diploma (MS). Initially, he worked as his teacher about geometry, but moved with his doctorate in 1896 at the University of Chicago ( the first in mathematics at this university ), where he studied with Heinrich Maschke, Oskar Bolza and Eliakim Hastings Moore, the group theory. He then attended the leading European group theorists Sophus Lie in Leipzig and Camille Jordan in Paris. In 1899 he became a professor at Austin and from 1900 effort from Moore back in Chicago, where in 1910 a full professorship and was until his retirement in 1939 remained, apart from several visiting professorships at the University of California, Berkeley.

For his dissertation was in 1901 a book on finite groups out, especially as matrix groups ( general linear group) in finite fields of arbitrary prime power characteristic ( Galois field ), in which he many results of Camille Jordan, Émile Mathieu, among others was continuing and simplified.

He also made contributions to additive number theory, for example in the Waring problem ( and where other exact formula for g ( k) follows from the work of him, SS Pillai ). His History of the theory of numbers is considered the standard work, where many results in number theory can be traced precisely in its history.

During his time in Chicago, the residence of the Scottish mathematician Wedderburn, who proved that all finite division algebras are commutative falls. Here he worked closely with Dickson, who found independent evidence for this set. Dickson made ​​the theory of algebras to a further focus of his work, and the book The algebras and their number theory influenced the work of the algebraic school of Emmy Noether and Helmut Hasse in Germany, where important results have been achieved in the 1920s and 1930s, strong.

Dickson was the first who received the Cole Prize for Algebra (1928 for his book algebras and their number theory). He was instrumental in the rise of algebra in the U.S. and created a large school, but he also high demands on its students. In 1920 he gave a plenary lecture at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Strasbourg ( Some Relations Between The Theory of Numbers and Other Branches of Mathematics ) and also in 1925 in Toronto ( Outline of the theory to date of the arithmetics of algebras ).

He was married in 1902 and had three children.