James Pierpont (mathematician)
James P. Pierpont ( born June 16, 1866 in Connecticut; † December 9, 1938 in San Mateo, California ) was an American mathematician.
Life and work
Pierpont came from an old New England family, one of his ancestors ( the pastor James Pierpont ( 1659-1714 ) ) was co-founder of Yale University ( then and still alive by James Pierpont Yale College). He was the son of a wealthy businessman Cornelius Pierpont in New Haven and graduated from Worcester Polytechnic Institute, where he switched to mathematics from mechanical engineering. From 1886 he continued his studies at the Humboldt University of Berlin ( where he was particularly influenced by Leopold Kronecker ) and at the University of Vienna, where in 1894 he earned his doctorate at Leopold Gegenbauer ( On the history of the quintic until 1858, Monatshefte für Mathematics 1895). There he made friends with Wilhelm Wirtinger and Gustav von Escherich. After that, he was a lecturer at Yale University, where he was instructor in 1895, 1896 Assistant Professor and Professor in 1898. In 1933, he went into retirement. He has been a visiting professor at Harvard University (1899/1900) and at the University of California, Berkeley ( 1929).
Pierpont was one of the pioneers who taught mathematics in the United States according to modern, learned to continental European universities methods. He dealt with algebra ( Galois theory ) and later with real and complex function theory. He carried in his book on real analysis, a one to the Lebesgue integral related concept, but which has been criticized by Maurice René Fréchet. Pierpont himself used in his lectures the concept of Lebesgue integral. Later he worked on non-Euclidean geometry.
In 1896 he was in Buffalo with Maxime Bôcher the first Colloquium Lectures of the American Mathematical Society ( his lectures were some of the few Colloquium Lectures, which appeared not printed). In 1925 he was Gibbs Lecturer of the American Mathematical Society. In 1924 he gave a plenary lecture at the International Congress of Mathematicians (ICM ) in Toronto (Non- euclidean geometry from non- projective standpoint ). In 1909 he was made an honorary Doctor of Clark University. In the period around the turn of the century he was one of the founders of the Transactions of the American Mathematical Society.
Writings
- Lectures on the theory of functions of real variable (2 volumes), Ginn and Company, Boston 1905, 1912 (English)
- Functions of a complex variable, Ginn and Company, Boston 1914 (English)