Viggo Brun

Viggo Brun ( born October 13, 1885 in Lier, † August 15 1978 in Drøbak ) was a Norwegian mathematician.

Life

Brun was the youngest of ten children of an artillery captain. He studied mathematics and natural sciences at the University of Oslo, to become a teacher, and attended the teacher state exam 1909. He never received his doctorate. In 1910 he traveled at his own expense a few months at the University of Göttingen, where he heard David Hilbert and Edmund Landau. From 1910 to 1915, he was awarded research grants in Oslo. A travel grant in 1914 to Paris, he was unable to start because of the First World War, he remained instead in Drøbak in Oslo. In between, he also performed his military service. From 1920 he was an assistant of Axel Thue of Applied Mathematics at the University. In 1923 he was appointed professor at the Norwegian Institute of Technology in Trondheim. He remained there until 1946, when he became a professor at the University of Oslo, where he stayed until his retirement in 1955.

His main achievement was an improvement of the sieve of Eratosthenes in Legendre's version. So he could make progress in Goldbach 's conjecture and the assumption of infinitely many twin primes. Brun is thus the actual originator of the important in analytic number theory sieve methods.

One of his conclusions was the proof that infinitely many natural numbers n exist such that n and n 1 Almost primes not exceeding ninth order are, so have a maximum of nine prime factors. Another consequence was the proposition that all sufficiently large even natural numbers can be written as a sum of two almost-primes not exceeding ninth order.

Occasionally, is his proposition that the sum of the reciprocals of all twin primes converges, that this sum can be calculated and that its value, the Brun's constant, known and even very small ( 1.902160583104 ... ), has been referred to as Brunscher joke. The mathematical joke is that the really interesting question whether there are infinitely many twin primes, remains despite the precise result of Brun open ( and the affirmative conjecture until now could not be proved ). The sum of the reciprocals of all prime numbers, however, is divergent, it follows that there are infinitely many ( Leonhard Euler ).

Also, a multi-dimensional generalization of the Euclidean algorithm is derived by Viggo Brun and was applied by him to the music theory (development of musical scales ).

Brun also dealt with the history of mathematics and wrote the books ( in Norwegian) " arithmetic in ancient Norway," 1962, and " All is number - history of mathematics from antiquity to the Renaissance ," 1964 He also found a following its submission to the Paris Academy. of Sciences in 1826 -lost manuscript of Niels Henrik Abel in Florence.

In 1966 he became an honorary doctorate from the University of Hamburg.

Among his pupils Atle Selberg heard.