Shmuel Agmon

Shmuel Agmon, sometimes cited as Samuel Agmon, (Hebrew שמואל אגמון; born February 2, 1922 in Tel-Aviv) is an Israeli mathematician who deals with partial differential equations and mathematical physics.

Life and work

Shmuel Agmon grew up in Nazareth, where his mother dentist and his father was a writer, and Jerusalem. After staying in a kibbutz, he studied from 1940 at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, where he among other things, studied with Michael Fekete and Adolf Abraham Halevi Fraenkel. During World War II he served four years in the British Army and then continued his studies in Paris, where he received his doctorate in 1949 at the Sorbonne in Szolem Mandelbrojt with a thesis on Dirichletserien. After that, he was at Rice University in Texas and from 1952 at the Hebrew University, where he was professor in 1959.

Agmon employed, inter alia, to with the spectral theory of Schrödinger operators and scattering theory. Is known for his work with A. Douglis and Louis Nirenberg of 1959 estimates of the solutions in boundary value problems of elliptic partial differential equations.

Since 1964, Shmuel Agmon is a member of the Israeli Academy of Sciences. He won the Weizmann Prize, the Rothschild Prize and the Israel Prize. Agmon holds honorary doctorates from the University of Nantes. In 1970 he was invited speaker at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Nice ( Spectral properties of Schrödinger operators ). He is a Fellow of the American Mathematical Society.

Among his doctoral students include Peter Constantin, Avner Friedman, Moshe Marcus and Yakar Kannai.

Writings

• Lectures on exponential decay of solutions of second-order elliptic equations: bounds on eigenfunctions of N -body Schrödinger operators, Princeton University Press 1982.
• Lectures on elliptic boundary value problems, Van Nostrand 1965