Edwin Hewitt

Edwin Hewitt ( born January 20, 1920 in Everett (Washington ), † 21 June 1999), was an American mathematician who worked on harmonic analysis.

Hewitt was the son of a lawyer and went to Everett, Seattle, St. Louis and Ann Arbor to school. From 1936 he studied mathematics at Harvard University, where he received his doctorate in 1942 at Marshall Stone (On a problem of set theoretic topology ). After military service in the U.S. Air Force during the Second World War he was 1945/46, as a Guggenheim Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study. After that, he was Assistant Professor at Bryn Mawr College and the University of Chicago before 1954 was professor at the University of Washington in Seattle, where he remained until his retirement, which, except for two interruptions as a professor at Yale University in 1959 and at University of Texas at Austin 1972/73. He had numerous visiting professorships, including at Uppsala University, in Australia, at the Steklov Institute in Moscow, at the University of Erlangen- Nuremberg, in Singapore, Alaska (Fairbanks ), Sapporo ( Hokkaido University). As he spoke French, Swedish, Russian, Japanese and German, he often taught in the languages ​​of the host university.

Hewitt dealt with abstract harmonic analysis ( generalizations of the Fourier analysis for locally compact abelian groups and compact nonabelian groups, instead of the circle or the real line in the case of Fourier series ). In addition he wrote with Kenneth A. Ross (Professor at the University of Oregon ) in two volumes Abstract Harmonic Analysis standard work in the basic teachings of the mathematical sciences series by Springer Verlag.

He also translated several Russian books into English, for example, the Elements of Representation Theory by Alexander Kirillov.

Writings

• Kenneth A. Ross Abstract Harmonic Analysis, Springer Verlag, Vol.1, 1963, 2nd edition 1979, Vol.2 1970
• Karl Stromberg: Real and abstract analysis: a modern treatment of the theory of functions of a real variable, Springer 1965, 1975
• Theory of functions of a real variable, New York, Rinehart and Winston 1960