E. Brian Davies

Edward Brian Davies ( born 1944 in Cardiff ) is a British mathematician.

Davies went to school in Wales, where his father was a mathematics teacher. He studied at Oxford University, where he graduated in 1965 made ​​and received his doctorate at David Edwards, 1968 ( Some problems in functional analysis ). He also received the Senior Mathematics Prize of the University. In 1968/69 he was at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton and then at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology before becoming a Tutorial Fellow (St. John 's College ) and from 1973 returned again as a University Lecturer at the University of Oxford. From 1981 he was a professor at King's College London was where he from 1990 to 1993, the Faculty of Mathematics initiated in 1996 a Fellow of King's College was founded in 2010 and retired.

He is mainly known for his work on spectral theory with applications to quantum mechanics and dealt among other things with not self - adjoint operators, eigenvalues ​​of graphs and elliptic partial differential operators. He also deals with the history of science and philosophy of science and has written popular science books. In Science through the looking glass he turns against a Platonic view of mathematics and is skeptical about using mathematical methods to arrive at a complete understanding of the nature or the human environment.

He was from 1983 to 1990 founding editor of the London Mathematical Society Student Texts, and founded in 2010 the journal Journal of Spectral Theory of the European Mathematical Society. In 1995 he became a Fellow of the Royal Society. In 1998 he was awarded the Senior Berwick Prize of the London Mathematical Society, which he was president from 2008 to 2009.

In 2010 he held the Gauss Lecture ( Platonism in Science and Mathematics ), 2011, he was awarded the Pólya Prize.

Writings

  • Quantum theory of open systems, Academic Press 1976
  • One parameter semi - groups, Academic Press, London Mathematical Society Monographs, 1980
  • Heat kernels and spectral theory, Cambridge Tracts in Mathematics, Volume 92, Cambridge University Press 1989
  • Spectral theory and differential operators, Cambridge University Press 1995
  • With Y. Safarev Spectral theory and geometry, London Mathematical Society Lecture Notes, vol 273, Cambridge University Press 1999
  • Linear operators and Their Spectra, Cambridge University Press 2007
  • Science in the looking glass: what do we really know, Oxford University Press 2003
  • Why Beliefs matter, Oxford University Press 2010
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