John Macnaghten Whittaker

John Macnaghten Whittaker ( aka Jack Whittaker, born March 7, 1905 in Cambridge, † January 29, 1984 in Sheffield ) was a British mathematician.

He was the son of the famous mathematician Edmund Taylor Whittaker. The family moved to Dublin in 1906 and 1912 to Edinburgh. Whittaker studied from 1920 at the University of Edinburgh and in 1923 at Trinity College, Cambridge. 1927 to 1929 he was Assistant Lecturer at the University of Edinburgh, where his father taught and where he earned his doctorate degree (D. Sc.). After that, he was a lecturer and Fellow of Pembroke College, Cambridge. From 1933 he was professor at the University of Liverpool. After the Second World War, he became increasingly administrative tasks and in 1953 Vice- Chancellor of the University of Sheffield, where he remained until his retirement in 1965. But he also held after that lectures in mathematics in Sheffield. He has been a visiting professor at Cairo University, to which he in the Second World War had contact since his time as an officer, and in Tehran.

Whittaker dealt primarily with function theory, for example, with the value distribution theory of Rolf Nevanlinna interpolation theory and. The Whittaker constant in the theory of entire functions is named after him, although the associated set by the Japanese mathematician Takenaka dates (which Whittaker attributed to him also correct). The Whittaker 's constant, whose precise value is unknown, the lower limit for the radius of a circular disk D in the complex plane in which an entire function exists ( with an additional requirement of their growth ) in D, as well as all their derivatives has at least one zero. Some of his early works also deal with quantum mechanics.

With his father, he played a role in the sampling theorem, it is therefore sometimes not only named after Claude Shannon, but also according to Whittaker and Vladimir Kotelnikov.

In 1929 he received the Smith Prize, in 1949 the Adams Prize. In 1928 he became a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, and in 1949 the Royal Society.

He was married in 1933 and had two sons.

Writings

  • Interpolatory function theory, Cambridge University Press, 1935, New York 1964
  • Series of Polynomials, Cairo 1944
  • Sur les Séries de Base de polynomial Quelconques, 1949
E. T. Whittaker Pembroke College (Cambridge) Complex analysis Nevanlinna theory Nyquist–Shannon sampling theorem
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