Thomas Wolff

Thomas H. Wolff ( * July 14, 1954 in New York City; † 31 July 2000 Kern County, California ) was an American mathematician who worked on Analysis.

Wolff, the nephew of mathematician Clifford Gardner, studied at Harvard University ( BA 1975) and received his doctorate in 1979 with Donald Sarason at the University of California, Berkeley. As a post-doc, he was at the University of Washington and the University of Chicago (from 1980 as a Fellow of the National Science Foundation). In 1982, he was Assistant Professor at Caltech, where he later taught as a professor, to the time from 1986 to 1988 at the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences of New York University and from 1992 to 1995 in Berkeley. He also has been a visiting professor at IHES (1990).

Wolff dealt in particular with harmonic analysis, as well as partial differential equations, potential theory, complex analysis, geometric measure theory. Even with his dissertation, he attracted attention, and soon after (1979 ) augmented by his new simpler proof of the Corona theorem of Lennart Carleson ( proven by this 1962) in complex analysis, which was known as notoriously difficult.

With Barry Simon, he worked 1986 on localization in quantum systems with randomly distributed potentials.

In 1985 he received the Salem Prize. In 1986 he was invited speaker at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Berkeley ( Generalizations of Fatou 's theorem ) and in Berlin in 1998 ( maximum averages and packing of one dimensional sets). In 1999 he received the Bôcher Memorial Prize for his work on the Kakeya problem that he was concerned with combinatorial methods, and harmonious dimensions. He proved with Peter Jones you long lasting conjecture that harmonic measurements exist in the plane only in one dimension.

In 1995 he showed that the Minkowski dimension of Besicovich amount (which is a line of length 1 in any orientation contains ) in n- dimensional Euclidean spaces at least, is an important step to prove the Kakeya conjecture .. Its lower limit was later Terence Tao and Nets Katz improved.

He died in a car accident. Wolff was married to the mathematician Carol Shubin ( professor at California State University, Northridge ) and had two sons.

Writings

• Lectures on harmonic analysis, AMS 2003 ( edited by Carol Shubin, Izabella Laba )