Johannes van der Corput
John Gualtherus van der Corput ( born September 4, 1890 in Rotterdam, † September 16, 1975 in Amsterdam) was a Dutch mathematician who worked on analytic number theory and analysis.
Life and work
Van der Corput studied from 1908 to 1914 at the University of Leiden, among others, the number theorist January Cornelis Kluyver. In the time of the First World War, he served as an officer and was from 1917 teacher in Leeuwarden and Utrecht. At the same time he received his doctorate in Leiden in analytic number theory ( the dissertation was published in 1919 in Groningen superlattice points in the plane, over roosterpunten in het plate vlak ). In 1920, he was with Edmund Landau in Göttingen, 1920-1922 Assistant by Arnaud Denjoy at Utrecht University, 1922 Professor at the University of Fribourg in Switzerland and from 1923 professor in Groningen. From 1945 to 1953 he was a professor at the University of Amsterdam. He was co-founder of the Mathematical Centre ( Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica today ) in Amsterdam and was from 1946 to 1953 as its first director. In 1953 he went to the USA: the University of California, Berkeley and the University of Wisconsin- Madison.
He worked until 1940 almost exclusively with analytic number theory ( among others, the following issues: distribution of grid points, Vinogradov's methods for estimation of exponential sums, geometry of numbers, Goldbach 's conjecture, Diophantine approximation, order of growth of the Riemann zeta function ), then with other mathematical problems. For example, he published a new proof of the fundamental theorem of algebra and he contributed to the popularization of the elementary proof of the prime number theorem of Paul Erdős and Atle Selberg at.
In 1922, he proved ( tightening of Assessment at the divider problem, Mathematische Annalen, Vol 87 1922, p.39 ), that the number of integer lattice points N asymptotically in a circle with radius
Is a constant. Until then, it was over 1 /3 for a lower limit of the exponent in the asymptotic residual term ( the lower limit of ¼ was in 1915 by Godfrey Harold Hardy and Edmund Landau proved). A similar estimate he gave for the asymptotic residual term of the divisor function number.
In 1929 he became a member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Sciences and he was also a member of the Royal Belgian Academy of Sciences and honorary doctorates from Bordeaux and Delft. In 1936 he gave a plenary lecture at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Oslo ( Diophantine approximations ).
Among his students were among Jurjen Koksma, Lubbertus Nieland Jan Popken, Cornelis Simon Meijer and Barend Meulenbeld.