Theodor Estermann
Theodor Estermann ( born February 5, 1902 in Neubrandenburg, † November 29, 1991 ) was a British mathematician who worked on analytic number theory.
Estermann was the son of a Jewish businessman from Lithuania, his mother was a corset maker from Latvia. He attended the Torah School in Hamburg, where he learned Hebrew and German, to the family as a supporter of the Zionist movement in 1914 to Palestine (then turkish ) moved. There he attended school in Jerusalem. The family moved in 1918 back to Hamburg. Estermann studied mathematics and physics at the University of Göttingen ( he heard among others, David Hilbert, Edmund Landau ) and the University of Hamburg, where he received his PhD under Hans Rademacher 1925, with a theme from the measure theory ( About Carathéodory and Minkowski generalizations of the length of the term). After that he went to Palestine, where his father had moved, and 1926 to England to study at University College London. In 1928, he earned his D.Sc. After a short trip to Hamburg, he became assistant in 1929 and 1931 Lecturer at University College. In 1940 he became Reader and Professor in 1965. In 1969 he retired, but remained until 1987 Honorary Research Fellow. After he retired because of his dwindling eyesight.
Estermann dealt among other things with Kloosterman sums, the Waring problem, sieve methods, prime number distribution, representations of numbers as sums of squares, Goldbach 's conjecture. He proved in the framework of the Goldbach conjecture that every sufficiently large even number can be represented as the sum of a prime and an almost prime with at most six factors, which in 1947 greatly exacerbated by Alfred Renyi and 1966 by Chen Jingrun on a fast prime number maximum of 2 factors was tightened.
From 1948 he was a British citizen. He was married to Tamara Pringsheim, a granddaughter of Alfred Pringsheim since 1936 and had six children with her.
His doctoral include Heini Halberstam, Klaus Friedrich Roth, Robert Charles Vaughan.
His older brother Immanuel Estermann was a physicist.
Writings
- Introduction to modern prime number theory, Cambridge Tracts, 1952
- Complex numbers and functions, University of London, Athlone Press 1962