Oswald Veblen
Oswald Veblen (* June 24, 1880 in Decorah, Iowa; † August 10, 1960 in Brooklyn, Maine ) was an American mathematician of Norwegian descent.
Life
In 1903 he received his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago with the work A System of Axioms for Geometry. In 1905 he joined the staff at Princeton University, from 1910 as a professor of mathematics. In 1917, he joined the army and served as Captain and later Major A team of mathematicians, including Norbert Wiener and the astronomer Forest Ray Moulton, which at the newly founded Aberdeen Proving Ground examined ballistic problems. Among other things, they calculated out firing tables and developed new calculation method for the exterior ballistics, the classic methods of Francesco Siacci.
In 1926 he became Henry B. Fine Professor of Mathematics at Princeton and 1928/29, he was in exchange with Godfrey Harold Hardy, who it went to Princeton, a professor at Oxford. In 1932 he was a visiting professor at various German universities (Göttingen, Berlin, Hamburg).
From 1932 he was professor at the newly founded Institute for Advanced Study, which he built with. Here he also made sure emigrants who fled Germany before the Nazis take. Albert Einstein, Hermann Weyl and John von Neumann came then to the Institute for Advanced Study and contributed significantly to its reputation.
Veblen provided valuable contributions in topology, projective geometry and differential geometry, he turned in the 1930s under the influence of general relativity. He wrote influential early textbooks on topology and foundations of differential geometry ( with Whitehead ). Later he turned spinors in the ( general) theory of relativity (some with John von Neumann and Abraham Haskel Taub ) and an extension of general relativity, the projective theory of relativity.
According to him, the Axiom of Veblen -Young is named in projective geometry and the Veblen hierarchy in the theory of large ordinals. The set of Veblen and Young says that projective spaces in three or more dimensions can be designed as vector spaces over skew fields. In a book with JHC Whitehead ( 1933) he gave the first rigorous definition of differentiable manifolds.
He criticized the proof of Camille Jordan over the set of curves and gave a new proof.
Veblen was a member of the National Academy of Sciences, Vice-President ( 1915) and President (1923 /24) of the American Mathematical Society Colloquium Lecturer of which he was in 1916 ( with lectures on topology). 1928 during his stay in England he was in the Council of the London Mathematical Society. He was an honorary doctor among other things, Oxford ( 1929), Hamburg, Glasgow, Edinburgh and Oslo. He was a member of the Danish, French, Polish Academies of Sciences and the Royal Society of Edinburgh and received (like his father) the Norwegian St. Olav's Order. In 1936 he gave a plenary lecture at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Oslo ( spinor and Projective geometry ) and also in Bologna in 1928 ( differential invariants in geometry ).
His doctoral include Alonzo Church, James W. Alexander, Harold Hotelling, Robert Lee Moore and JHC Whitehead.
Veblen, who even in his last years, partially blind, also invented some aids for the blind, who were expelled from the U.S. blind society. He was since 1908 with Elizabeth Richardson, the sister of Owen Willans Richardson, married. The marriage remained childless.
He was a nephew of Thorstein Veblen.
On 28 March 2002 the asteroid ( 31665 ) Veblen was named after him.