Jesse Douglas
Jesse Douglas ( born July 3, 1897 in New York; † October 7, 1965 ) was an American mathematician. It was in 1936 as one of the first two mathematicians the Fields medal for the solution of the Plateau problem in differential geometry.
Douglas won already at City College in New York prices in mathematics and studied from 1916 at Columbia University in New York, among others at Edward Kasner. In 1920 he received his doctorate with a thesis from the differential geometric calculus of variations. 1920-1926 he taught at Columbia College and published next to it. In the years 1926 to 1930 he attended on a scholarship, universities, Princeton, Harvard, Chicago, Paris and Göttingen ( 1930).
In 1930, he broke - and independently of him Tibor Radó - the plateau problem, which had already been set up by Lagrange in the 18th century. Here, the proof of the existence of a minimal surface is to be provided for a given edge. For this he was awarded the Fields Medal in 1943 by the American Mathematical Society to Bôcher Memorial Prize. Douglas and Rado solved this question of the calculus of variations with the help of the Dirichlet principle, by a suitable functional ( though not the same as the surface is functional ) constructed whose minimum yields the minimal surface. Douglas went on to study a few other variants of the problem. Later, he also worked in group theory.
From 1930 to 1937 he was at MIT. After holding various positions, among others, 1934/5 and 1938 /9 on the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, he was in 1955 again at City College in New York.
He was married in 1940 and had a son.
Writings
- Solution of the Problem of Plateau.Trans. Amer. Math Soc. 33 (1931 ), no 1, 263-321.
- Green's function and the Problem of Plateau, American Journal of Mathematics, v. 61 (1939 ), pp. 545-589
- The most general form of the problem- of Plateau, American Journal of Mathematics, v. 61 (1939 ), pp. 590-608
- Solution of the inverse problem- of the calculus of variations, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, v. 25 (1939 ), pp. 631-637.
- Survey of the theory of integration, New York 1947