Edward Kasner

Edward Kasner ( born April 2, 1878 in New York City, New York, † January 7, 1955 ibid ) was an American mathematician who worked primarily with geometry and differential geometry.

Kasner studied from 1897 at the Columbia University with Prof. Cassius Keyser, where he received his doctorate in 1900 with the thesis " The invariant theory of the inversion group " ( engl. "The Invariant Theory of the Inversion Group "). As the first Jew he got a job as a tutor at Columbia University.

He contributed much to the popularization of mathematics. He is known for example for his role in the invention of the word " googol ". End of the 1930s he was asked to think of a name for a very large number. He entrusted this task to his nine- year-old nephew Milton Sirotta who invented the word " googol ". A googol is 10 to the power 100 (equivalent to a 1 with 100 zeros ) ( first in his popular book Mathematics and the imagination ). The name "Google " for the Internet search engine is a play on the word " googol ".

His PhD is one of Rufus Isaacs.