Basil Gordon

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Basil Gordon (born December 23, 1931 in Baltimore , † January 12, 2012 ) was an American mathematician and professor at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA).

Gordon studied mathematics and physics at the Baltimore Polytechnic Institute and at Johns Hopkins University with a bachelor's degree in 1953. He received his doctorate in 1956 with Tom Apostol at Caltech in mathematics ( Some Tauberian Theorems Connected with the Prime Number Theorem ). He then served in the US Army, where he helped determine the orbit of the first US American satellite Explorer 1 . From 1959 he was at UCLA, where he was a professor until his retirement in 1993. In 1962 he became a Sloan Research Fellow .

He dealt with algebra, number theory, combinatorics and group theory. Among other things, he dealt with generalizations of the Rogers-Ramanujan identities (Göllnitz-Gordon identities, also named after Heinz Göllnitz ).

The Gaussian Moat Problem (1962), which has not been solved to this day, also originates from him : is it possible to specify an infinite sequence of Gaussian primes (prime numbers in the ring of Gaussian numbers ) so that the distance between successive prime numbers is limited? This is not the case with ordinary prime numbers, since there are arbitrarily large gaps between prime numbers (consider the sequence for any n , a sequence of (n-1) composite numbers).

From 1970 to 2002 he was Managing Editor of the Journal of Combinatorial Theory. He was also editor of the Pacific Journal of Mathematics and founding editor of the Ramanujan Journal.

His PhD students include Robert Guralnick and Ken Ono .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Basil Gordon in the Mathematics Genealogy Project (English)Template: MathGenealogyProject / Maintenance / id used
  2. ↑ Gordon, Some Continued Fractions of the Rogers-Ramanujan Type, Duke Math. J., Volume 32, 1965, pp. 741-748
  3. ↑ Ellen Gethner, Stan Wagon, Brian Wick: A stroll through the Gaussian primes, The American Mathematical Monthly, Volume 105, 1998, pp. 327-337
personal data
SURNAME Gordon, Basil
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American mathematician
DATE OF BIRTH December 23, 1931
PLACE OF BIRTH Baltimore
DATE OF DEATH January 12, 2012