Cornelius Lanczos

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Cornelius Lanczos ([ ˈlaːntsoʃ ]; also Kornél Lőwy, Kornél Lánczos ; born February 2, 1893 in Székesfehérvár , Austria-Hungary ; † June 25, 1974 in Budapest ) was a Hungarian mathematician and physicist.

Life

Lanczos was born the son of the lawyer Károly (Carolus) Lőwy, attended a Jewish elementary school and then a Catholic high school. His real name was Kornél Lőwy, but in the anti-German climate of the then Hungary he changed it to Kornél Lánczos, and under this name he later published in Germany. In 1910 he began his studies in Budapest , where he a. a. Studied physics with Loránd Eötvös and mathematics with Leopold Fejér . After graduating in 1915 he was an assistant at the Polytechnic and received his doctorate in 1921 under Rudolf Ortvay at the University of Szeged on a topic of relativity theory ("The function-theoretical relationships of Maxwell's ether equations"), which he sent to Albert Einstein , who welcomed it.

From politically troubled Hungary, where he could not find a job as a Jew , he first went to the University of Freiburg as an assistant to Franz Himstedt , then was at the University of Frankfurt as an assistant to Erwin Madelung , where he worked on the new edition of his "Mathematical Aids des Physikers ”, where he got in touch with the Hilbert School in Göttingen through Richard Courant . In between he was after his habilitation in Frankfurt in 1927 in the years 1928/29 with a scholarship of the Notgemeinschaft der deutschen Wissenschaft as assistant to Einstein in Berlin, with whom he also corresponded later and whom he admired all his life. He published on general relativity and on cosmology and tried from the late 1920s to find unified field theories that also include quantum mechanics .

From 1922 to 1924 he was secretary of the German Physical Society . In 1931 he was visiting professor for theoretical physics at Purdue University in West Lafayette in Indiana , where he stayed from 1932, as the return to Germany was impossible due to the persecution of the Jews (but he became an associate professor in Frankfurt in 1932). From 1938 he turned to numerical mathematics there. Since he felt isolated among the physicists in Purdue, he went from 1946 as an applied mathematician to Boeing in Seattle , for which he had already worked in 1944. In 1949 he went to the numerical mathematics department of the National Bureau of Standards of the USA in Los Angeles (where he also worked during the war in 1943/4), as a colleague of Otto Szasz , Olga Taussky-Todd and John Todd . He did not like the political atmosphere of the McCarthy years , and in 1952 he went to the Institute for Advanced Study in Dublin at the invitation of Erwin Schrödinger , but was often visiting scholar at American universities or in industry (including Ford Motor Company). In 1958 he gave a plenary lecture at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Edinburgh (Extended boundary value problems).

In 1932 he became a Fellow of the American Physical Society . In 1960 he was awarded the Mathematical Association of America's Chauvenet Prize .

He was married twice and had a son from his first marriage. In 1974 he died of a heart attack while visiting the University of Budapest.

plant

Lanczos also dealt with mathematical physics, especially with general relativity. In 1925 he got to know the quantum theoretical matrix mechanics from Werner Heisenberg , Max Born and Pascual Jordan and tries to give it a "field-like" representation with integral equations with the eigenfunctions belonging to the eigenvalues ​​of the matrices as core functions. But Erwin Schrödinger got ahead of him here, using differential equations instead of integral equations. Lanczos' work was only later recognized by Bartel Leendert van der Waerden . In 1930/1931 he investigated the Stark effect in strong electric fields. In 1949 he wrote a book on the principles of variation in mechanics.

Lanczos made numerous contributions to numerical mathematics. In 1950 and 1952 he published two articles on what he called the method of minimized iterates for solving Fredholm's integral equations , linear systems of equations and eigenvalue problems . The two articles form the basis of what is known today as the class of Lanczos methods and were the first of the Krylow subspace methods still used today . The older Krylow subspace methods by Alexei Nikolajewitsch Krylow from 1931 and Karl Hessenberg from 1940 cannot be implemented as efficiently; the Lanczos process represents a significant improvement.

In 1964 Lanczos published his method for approximating the gamma function . He also dealt with Chebyshev functions . In 1940 he published what was later rediscovered by John W. Tukey as the Fast Fourier Transform .

literature

  • Helmut Rechenberg:  Lánczos, Cornel. In: New German Biography (NDB). Volume 13, Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 1982, ISBN 3-428-00194-X , p. 476 f. ( Digitized version ).
  • J. David Brown, Chu, Ellison, Plemmons (Eds.) Proceedings of the Cornelius Lanczos International Conference, SIAM, Philadelphia 1994 (with biography of Barbara Gellai and list of publications)
  • WR Davies (Ed.) "Cornelius Lanczos: Complete works with commentary", Raleigh, North Carolina 1999
  • Yourgrau, Obituary in Foundations of Physics Vol. 5, 1975, p. 19.
  • Lanczos "The variational principles of mechanics", University of Toronto Press 1949, 4th edition 1974, Dover Paperback
  • Lanczos "Linear differential operators", van Nostrand 1961, SIAM 1996
  • Lanczos "Albert Einstein and the cosmic world order", Interscience 1966
  • Lanczos "Space through the ages- the evolution of geometric ideas from Pythagoras to Hilbert and Einstein", Academic Press 1970
  • Lanczo's “The Einstein Decade (1905–1915)”, London 1974
  • Lanczos The Poisson bracket in quantum mechanics , Phys. Leaves, July 1975, online
  • Lanczos On a Stationary Cosmology in the sense of Einstein's theory of gravity , Zeitschrift für Physik, Volume 21, 1924, p. 73

Web links

Sources and Notes

  1. ↑ Lanczos "On a field-like representation of the new quantum mechanics", Zeitschrift für Physik Vol. 35, 1926, p. 112.
  2. ↑ in Mehra “The physicists concept of Nature” 1974. To van der Waerden's great surprise, Lanczos was also present at the conference at his lecture.
  3. ^ C. Lanczos: An Iteration Method for the Solution of the Eigenvalue Problem of Linear Differential and Integral Operators . In: Journal of research of the National Bureau of Standards . tape 45 , 1950, pp. 255-282 , doi : 10.6028 / jres.045.026 (English).
  4. ^ C. Lanczos: Solution of systems of linearized equations by minimized iterations . In: Journal of research of the National Bureau of Standards . tape 49 , 1952, pp. 33-53 , doi : 10.6028 / jres.049.00 (English).
personal data
SURNAME Lanczos, Cornelius
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Kornél Lőwy, Kornél Lánczos
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Hungarian mathematician and physicist
DATE OF BIRTH February 2, 1893
PLACE OF BIRTH Székesfehérvár
DATE OF DEATH June 25, 1974
Place of death Budapest