Alfred van der Poorten

Alfred " Alf" Jacobus van der Poorten ( born May 16, 1942 in Amsterdam, † October 9, 2010 in Australia) was an Australian mathematician who worked on number theory.

Van der Poorten spent as a Jew hiding under an assumed name his first years under the German occupation in Amsterdam. His deported parents survived the war and the family emigrated in 1950 from Sydney. He studied Mathematics (Bachelor 1965) and received his doctorate in 1968 at the University of New South Wales, to George Szekeres and Kurt Mahler. In 1970, he also made it a bachelor's degree in 1973 and his master's degree in philosophy. At university he was also an early politically active (as student representatives and union representatives later ). In 1969 he was at his university in Sydney Lecturer, Senior Lecturer in 1972 and Associate Professor in 1976, after one year of residence at Leiden University and Cambridge University. In 1979 he was a professor at Macquarie University, where until 1996 Head of the School of Mathematics and Physics, he was from 1980 to 1986 and 1991 and 1986/87 and 1997 to 2001 Chairman of the Senate of the University. He is now professor emeritus there. He has been a visiting professor at the University of Delft, the MSRI, Bordeaux University, Queens University, Kingston ( Ontario).

He has published more than 180 works, in particular in number theory. His most recent work is mainly concerned with Diophantine approximation and continued fractions.

1996 to 1998 he was president of the Australian Mathematical Society, whose Szekeres Medal he was awarded in 2002 and whose glory he became a member in 2009. In 1998 he became an honorary doctorate from the University of Bordeaux. Both in Canada and in the Netherlands, he was a member of an official evaluation committee for the universities. In 2004 he became a member of the Order of Australia.

He has been married since 1972 and have two children.

Writings

  • An introduction to continued fractions, in: Loxton, van der Poorten (Editor) Diophantine Analysis. London Mathematical Society Lecture Note Vol 109, 1986
  • With Wieb Bosma (Eds. ): Computational algebra and number theory. Kluwer 1995
  • Notes on Fermat 's Last Theorem. Wiley 1996 ( received the 1996 Scholarly Publishing Award of the Association of American Publishers), ISBN 0471062618
  • Thomas Ward, Graham Everest, Igor Shparlinski: Recurrence sequences, American Mathematical Society 2003
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