Alf van der Poorten

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Alf van der Poorten in Oberwolfach , 2004

Alfred "Alf" Jacobus van der Poorten (born May 16, 1942 in Amsterdam , † October 9, 2010 in Australia ) was an Australian mathematician who dealt with number theory.

Van der Poorten spent his first years under the German occupation in Amsterdam as a Jew, hiding under a false name. His deported parents survived the war and the family emigrated to Sydney in 1950. He studied mathematics (Bachelor 1965) and received his doctorate in 1968 at the University of New South Wales with George Szekeres and Kurt Mahler . In 1970 he also received a bachelor's degree and in 1973 his master's degree in philosophy. At the university he was also politically active at an early age (as a student spokesman and later a union representative). In 1969 he became Lecturer at his University in Sydney, in 1972 Senior Lecturer and 1976 Associate Professor, after spending a year at Leiden University and Cambridge University . In 1979 he went as a professor at Macquarie University , where he was head of the School of Mathematics and Physics from 1980 to 1986 and 1991 to 1996, and Senate Chairman of the university in 1986/87 and 1997 to 2001. He has now retired there. He was visiting professor at Delft University , MSRI , Bordeaux University and Queens University in Kingston (Ontario) , among others .

He has published over 180 papers, particularly on number theory. Most recently he was mainly concerned with Diophantine approximation and continued fractions .

From 1996 to 1998 he was President of the Australian Mathematical Society , of which he received the Szekeres Medal in 2002 and of which he became an honorary member in 2009. In 1998 he received an honorary doctorate from the University of Bordeaux . In both Canada and the Netherlands, he was a member of an official evaluation committee for universities. In 2004 he became a member of the Order of Australia .

He has been married since 1972 and has two children.

Fonts

  • An introduction to continued fractions. In: John H. Loxton, Alf J. Van der Poorten (eds.): Diophantine Analysis. Proceedings of the Number Theory Section of the 1985 Australian Mathematical Society Convention (= London Mathematical Society. Lecture Note Series. 109). Cambridge University Press, Cambridge et al. 1986, ISBN 0-521-33923-5 , pp. 99-138.
  • as editor with Wieb Bosma: Computational algebra and number theory (= Mathematics and its Applications. 325). Kluwer, Dordrecht et al. 1995, ISBN 0-7923-3501-5 .
  • Notes on Fermat's Last Theorem. Wiley, New York NY et al. 1996, ISBN 0-471-06261-8 (received the 1996 Scholarly Publishing Award from the Association of American Publishers).
  • with Thomas Ward , Graham Everest , Igor Shparlinski : Recurrence sequences (= Mathematical Surveys and Monographs. 104). American Mathematical Society, Providence RI 2003, ISBN 0-8218-3387-1 .

Web links

personal data
SURNAME Poorten, Alf van der
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Poorten, Alfred Jacobus van der (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Australian mathematician
DATE OF BIRTH May 16, 1942
PLACE OF BIRTH Amsterdam
DATE OF DEATH October 9, 2010
Place of death Australia