Fritz John

Fritz John (born 14 June 1910 in Berlin, † February 10, 1994 in New Rochelle, New York ) was an American mathematician of German descent.

Life

John studied from 1929 to 1933 in Göttingen, where he was influenced among others by Richard Courant. After the seizure of power by Hitler in 1933, he looked for a "non - Aryans " no future in Nazi Germany and decided to go to England.

In 1934, John published his first work on Morse theory. In the same year he was at the University of Göttingen in Courant doctorate (determination of a function from its integrals over certain manifolds ) and he walked with the help of Courant for a year to Cambridge.

John was appointed in 1935 as assistant professor at the University of Kentucky and emigrated to the United States, whose citizenship he obtained in 1941. He remained in Kentucky until 1946, where he was released from work there from 1943 to 1945 for his work on Ballistikforschungszentrum ( Ballistic Research Laboratory ) of the Aberdeen Proving Ground, Maryland. In 1946 he got a job at the New York University, where he remained until the end.

In the 1940s and 1950s he worked on the Radon transform with particular emphasis on their application in the field of nonlinear partial differential equations and convex geometry.

In 1981 he finished his work, but continued his work on non- linear wave equations.

Throughout his career he received many awards and honors, including the Birkhoff Prize for Applied Mathematics in 1973, the Leroy P. Steele Prize of the American Mathematical Society in 1982 and the Radon - Medal of the Austrian Academy of Sciences in 1992. 1984 he was MacArthur Fellow. In 1966 he was invited speaker at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Moscow ( The effect of geometry on elastic behavior ).

Named after him are John ellipsoid, the John - area (English John domain) and the Fritz - John conditions.

His doctoral Sergiu Klainerman heard.