Harry Reuter

Gerd Edzard "Harry" Reuter , often cited as GEH Reuter, called Harry Reuter, (born November 21, 1921 in Berlin , † April 20, 1992 ) was a German-born British mathematician who dealt with probability theory.

Harry Reuter was the son of the future mayor of Berlin, Ernst Reuter , who had to leave Germany as a social democrat during the period of National Socialism. Harry Reuter came to England in 1935, where he was accepted into the home of mathematician John Charles Burkill in Cambridge (who also took in other refugees). He studied at Trinity College and did his PhD with Frank Smithies at Cambridge University ( Probability theory and stochastic processes ), where he took the Tripos exams in 1941 , but then did his military service as a scientific officer with the British Admiralty. In 1945 he and John Todd secured the Mathematisches Forschungsinstitut Oberwolfach from being confiscated by the French. He then continued his studies as a research student with John Edensor Littlewood and Mary Cartwright . Before he could do his doctorate, Max Newman brought him to the University of Manchester, where he worked with Walter Ledermann on stochastic processes in 1952 (existence theorems for Markov chains with stable conservative generators, work on birth and death processes). He then taught from 1959 as a professor in Durham and later at Imperial College in London . He later lived in Cambridge.

In addition to his work with Ledermann on Markov processes, he is also known for his collaboration with David George Kendall in the 1950s on continuous Markov processes.

He had been a British citizen since 1938.

literature

• Ulrich Krengel in G. Fischer a. a. A century of mathematics (Festschrift 100 years DMV), Vieweg 1990, p. 478f
• John Kingman , Reuter (Editor): Probability, statistics and analysis, Cambridge University Press, London Mathematical Society Lecture Notes, 1983 (Commemorative publication on the 65th birthday of David Kendall)
• David Kendall, John Kingman (editor): Analytic and geometric stochastics- papers in honor of GEHReuter, Sheffield, Applied Probability Trust 1986 (with an article by Kendall on Reuter)