Patrick du Val

Patrick du Val ( March 26, 1903 in Cheadle Hulme, Cheshire, † January 22, 1987 in Cambridge ) was an English mathematician who dealt among other things with geometry and algebraic geometry.

Life

Du Val was a sickly teenager and was taught by his mother ( the marriage of the parents was divorced ) and through a correspondence course from the University of London, graduating in 1926 with honors. In addition to mathematical interests he was also interested in languages ​​and brought, for example, in Norwegian to read Ibsen. In 1927 he began his studies at Trinity College, Cambridge University, where he became interested in under the influence of HF Baker for algebraic geometry, which he received his doctorate also at Baker 1930 ( On Certain Configurations of Algebraic Geometry Having Groups of Self- transformation representable by Symmetry Groups of Certain polygon ). His fellow students at Cambridge were among other HSM Coxeter, WVD Hodge and John Semple, with whom he was friends. In 1930, he was for four years a Fellow of Trinity College and traveled to Rome, where he worked with Federigo Enriques, and to Princeton, where he heard, among other things Solomon Lefschetz, Hermann Weyl and Joseph Wedderburn. 1936 to 1941 he was a lecturer at Manchester University and then went as professor to Istanbul, funded by the British Council. He learned the Turkish language and even wrote a textbook in Turkish. He was still teaching in the United States at the University of Georgia and then in England in Bristol and from 1953 at University College London, where he remained until his retirement in 1970, with Semple headed the geometry seminar. Then he went back three years his old post in Istanbul, and then finally to go into retirement in Cambridge.

He has worked on algebraic surfaces, where a singularity ( a colon ) bears his name.

Writings

  • On isolated singularities of surfaces Which do not affect, the conditions of adjunction. I, II, III, Proceedings of the Cambridge Philosophical Society, vol 30, 1934, S.453, 460th
  • On surfaces Whose canonical system is hyperelliptic. Canadian Journal of Mathematics, vol 4, 1952, p.204.
  • Homographies, quaternions and rotations. Oxford Mathematical Monographs, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1964.
  • Elliptic functions and elliptic curves. London Mathematical Society Lecture Note Series, no. 9, Cambridge University Press 1973.
Henrik Ibsen University of Cambridge Princeton (New Jersey) Integrated Authority File
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