Harold Davenport
Harold Davenport ( born October 30, 1907 in Huncoat, Lancashire, England; † June 9, 1969 in Cambridge, England ) was an English mathematician who worked primarily in number theory.
Life and work
Harold Davenport studied at the University of Manchester ( until 1927 ) and at Trinity College, University of Cambridge ( among others, John Edensor Littlewood, where he worked on the theory of numbers theme of the distribution of quadratic residues).
As a " Research Fellow " he went 1932/33, to the University of Göttingen and Helmut Hasse at the University of Marburg, a " stronghold of number theory " was back then. In Cambridge, however, more analytic number theory in the style of Godfrey Harold Hardy and Littlewood and operated their "circle method" was. There, the Hasse - Davenport relations for Gauss sums incurred. Davenport learned here also his later co-author Hans Heilbronn. He could, however, his dislike of algebraic methods never quite overcome. His remark to Hasse, he she should try for example to the Riemann hypothesis and show that what they are good, moved this to prove the same in the case of elliptic curves.
In 1937 he went to the University of Manchester and worked mainly on Diophantine approximations and geometry of numbers. From 1950 he was head of a school primarily in analytic number theory in England. 1957 to 1959 he was President of the London Mathematical Society. He taught at the University of Wales and University College London before " Rouse Ball Professor " in Cambridge in 1958.
Davenport is the author of the well-known Introduction to Number Theory The higher arithmetic, which first appeared in 1953.
1940 Davenport as a member ( "Fellow" ) was elected to the Royal Society, in 1967, the Sylvester Medal awarded him. In 1950 he gave a plenary lecture at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Cambridge (Massachusetts ) ( Recent progress in the geometry of numbers ) and in 1962 he was invited speaker at the ICM in Stockholm (homogeneous diophantine equations ).
Writings
- The higher arithmetic - an introduction to the theory of numbers, 8th edition, Cambridge University Press, 2008 ( supplemented by James H. Davenport ), first in 1952 Hutchinson House, New York
- Analytic methods for diophantine equations and Diophantine inequalities 1962, 2nd edition ( edited by TD Browning ), Cambridge University Press 2005
- Multiplicative number theory, Markham Publishing, Chicago 1967, 3rd edition ( edited by Hugh Montgomery ), Springer 2000
- Collected works, 4 vols, Academic Press, 1977 ( editor Bryan Birch, Heini Halberstam, Claude Rogers )
- Looking back, Journal London Mathematical Society Bd.41, 1966, p.1 ( memories )
- Davenport: About some recent advances in additive number theory, Annual Report DMV 1961.
- Davenport, Hasse: The zeros of the Kongruenzzetafunktion in some cases cyclic, Journal Pure and Applied Math, 1935.
- Davenport: On Certain exponential sums, Journal of Pure and Applied Mathematics, 1933.