Lionel Cooper (mathematician)

Jacob Lionel Bakst Cooper ( * December 27, 1915 in Beaufort West, Cape Province, South Africa; † August 8, 1979 in London) was a British mathematician who worked on Analysis.

Cooper, whose parents had a farm, went to school in Cape Town, where he began to study mathematics and physics in 1932, where he won several prizes and in addition active in the socialist student community. There were many Jewish refugees from Germany in Cape Town at the time, he also learned fluent German. From 1935, he studied with a Rhodes scholarship at Queens College, Oxford University. In 1940 he received his doctorate with Edward Charles Titchmarsh ( Theory and application of Fourier integrals ). During World War II he worked, as he was unfit for military service due to impaired vision, in an aircraft factory. After the war he was a lecturer at Birkbeck College and Imperial College in London and from 1951 professor at the University of Cardiff. In 1954 he was at Witwatersrand University as a Visiting Professor, 1964/65 he was a visiting professor at Caltech and from 1965 to 1967 at the University of Toronto. In 1967 he became head of the Mathematics Department at the Chelsea College, University of London. He died of a heart operation.

Cooper dealt with many areas of analysis, for example, the theory of unbounded operators in Hilbert spaces and integral transforms. He also published on applications in mathematical physics, such as in quantum mechanics, heat conduction, elasticity theory. With Albert Einstein he corresponded in 1949 about the Einstein - Podolsky - Rosen paradox, on which he published in 1950.

In 1949 he was awarded the Junior Berwick Prize.