Frank Nelson Cole

Frank Nelson Cole ( born September 20, 1861 in Ashland, Massachusetts, † May 26, 1926 in New York City ) was an American mathematician.

Life and work

Cole studied from 1878 to 1882 at Harvard University, and from 1883 to 1885 in Leipzig, where he attended lectures by Felix Klein. Cole submitted his written under the guidance of small doctoral thesis on his return to Harvard and received his PhD in 1886. After first teaching at Harvard from 1885 to 1887, he married in 1888, the native of Göttingen Martha Streiff and in the same year professor at the University of Michigan. From 1895 he worked at Columbia University. In the same year he was also CEO of the American Mathematical Society and editor of the Bulletin of the Society.

Cole published a number of important contributions to algebra and number theory, including - at the suggestion of Otto Hölder - a list of all simple groups of order ≤ 600 He also published in 1892 a contribution to the diurnal variation of air pressure.

At Coles pupils Eric Temple Bell belongs.

Cole Lecture

In 1903, he presented at a meeting of the American Mathematical Society in an unusual presentation, the factors of Mersenne numbers 267-1 (short M67). 1876 ​​Édouard Lucas had shown that this number is, contrary to the statement of Marin Mersenne, is not prime. Prime factors of this number, however, remained unknown.

In his presentation, Cole left without a word to the blackboard and calculated the value of M67. Then he wrote the task 193 707 721 761 838 257 287 · on the other side of the chalkboard. He led the tedious multiplication of handwritten and pointed at the end, that both calculations lead to the same result of 147,573,952,589,676,412,927. Without having spoken a word, Cole went back to his place while his colleagues stood up and applauded him. Cole later admitted that he had expected to find the factors for three years on the weekends.

Cole Price

After his death, for the first time in 1928, awarded the American Mathematical Society in his memory the Cole Price (English: Frank Nelson Cole Prize ) for outstanding mathematical achievements.

Writings

  • Eugen Netto ( translated by FN Cole ): The theory of substitutions and its applications to algebra. Ann Arbor, Michigan, 1892, online

Swell

  • You Sautoy Marcus: The music of the primes: In the footsteps of the greatest riddle of mathematics. Beck, Munich 2004, ISBN 3- 406-52320 -X, pp. 275 ( limited preview on Google Book Search ).
  • JJ O'Connor and EF Robertson: Frank Nelson Cole, accessed 4 October 2010
  • Steve Batterson: Bôcher, Osgood, and the Ascendance of American Mathematics at Harvard. (PDF, 751 kB) In: Notices of the AMS. Volume 56, 2009, pp. 916-928 ( in particular pages 920, also contains a photo- Coles)
Classification of finite simple groups Mersenne prime Mathematics Genealogy Project Cassius Jackson Keyser Constance Reid Integrated Authority File
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