John Edensor Littlewood

John Edensor Littlewood ( June 9, 1885 in Rochester (Kent), † September 6, 1977 in Cambridge ) was an English mathematician who worked primarily in the analysis.

Life and work

Littlewood attended St Paul 's School in London, where he was a pupil of Francis Macaulay. He then studied at Trinity College, Cambridge, where he was most of his life professor. In 1905, he was Senior Wrangler ( ie first ) in the mathematical " Tripos " - they determined at that time in Cambridge career, particularly obtaining the coveted " Fellow " status on one of the university colleges but (many senior Wrangler also went to politics or jurisprudence ), preferably the "Trinity College " Newton. The maths degree at Cambridge was tailored specifically to these tests, was used for the addition crammed with tutors as Routh, who even wrote books on mechanics, but otherwise was not a professor, but the most famous tutor for the Tripos. Littlewood saw this as a sporting challenge, even if he did not think much of the Tripos system and saw him as one of the causes for the backwardness of the then British mathematics. After all, he proved how was the consequence of the Riemann Hypothesis of the prime number theorem with error term. In his early research, he examined the Riemann Hypothesis, as he tells in his " Miscellany ", rather naively and as a sign of the former isolation of the English mathematician. He gave the other hand, young mathematicians the Council to try to difficult problems - perhaps they would not be the answer, but it will find other interesting results.

Around 1910 began his fruitful and long association with Hardy. The two investigated series, Trigonometric series, the Riemann zeta function, inequalities, and other areas of analysis. Together they developed in analytic number theory, the powerful " Circle Method" (also Hardy - Littlewood method called ). Your cooperation, often took on the Littlewood the hard analytical work and Hardy the "architecture", became proverbial, the Danish analyst Harald Bohr joked that there were only three great English mathematician at the time, Hardy, Littlewood and Hardy - Littlewood. As a German mathematician remarked that he would Littlewood considered a pseudonym Hardy, which he used for his lesser works, Littlewood took this externally with humor. They dominated the English mathematics until the 1950s, and formed a great school. In the 1920s, her work has been fertilized by the ideas of the brilliant but imperfectly educated Indian mathematician S. Ramanujan.

From the 1930s he examined - partly in cooperation with Mary Cartwright - even non-linear differential equations, which have about applications in the theory of electrical resonant circuits. With the early skiing in the Rocky Mountains unfortunate Raymond Paley, he worked on harmonic analysis.

His doctoral include Harold Davenport, Sarvadaman Chowla, Donald Spencer, Stanley Skewes, Albert Ingham, AOL Atkin, Peter Swinnerton - Dyer, Edward Collingwood, and (with Hardy ) Ramanujan.

Littlewood was stocky stature and very athletic. In his youth he was an outstanding cricketer and Turner, later he was a passionate mountaineer and skier, and wandered like. Like Hardy he watched like cricket matches. He suffered all his life from depression, which, for example, prevent him from playing a more active role in organizations. Also during his time as President of the London Mathematical Society he never stood before a meeting, but this was guided by his deputy. Later, he successfully took medication for his depression. He loved classical music (but would hear in his own words only Bach, Beethoven, Mozart, because life is too short for anything else ) and taught himself to play the piano as an adult even at.

Others

Littlewood Although never married but had a daughter Ann Streatfeild. For a long time he referred to them only as his niece, he was always devoted and with whom he often went on holiday. Later he had the strict confidentiality of its paternity remorse because he was worried about her future ( she later married the Swiss Carl Johannsen ). Bela Bollobás and his wife finally convinced him in the 1970s not to make his paternity publicly what he did one evening in the university meeting space by passing from her simply spoke of his daughter instead of his niece. The next morning he wondered why no one made ​​a fuss of it.

Honors

In 1915 he was elected as a member ( "Fellow" ) to the Royal Society, in 1929, the Royal Medal, 1943, the Sylvester Medal in 1958 awarded him the Copley Medal. From 1941 to 1943 he was President of the London Mathematical Society, of which he 1938, the De Morgan Medal and in 1960 was awarded the Senior Berwick Prize.

He was a member of the Göttingen Academy of Sciences ( 1925), Danish, Swedish, Dutch, and French (1957 ) Academies of Sciences.