David Francis Barrow

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David Francis Barrow ( November 14, 1888 in Athens , Georgia - February 4, 1970 ) was an American mathematician . The inequality of Barrow , which he proved in 1937, is named after him.

Barrow's father was math professor David Crenshaw Barrow Jr. , who taught at the University of Georgia at Athens and later became its chancellor. Barrow attended Athens High School and began studying at the University of Georgia in 1906 after graduating. In 1910 he completed his studies with a Bachelor of Science and then began to study at Harvard University , where he received his doctorate in 1913 . He then went to Europe for a year, where he attended various universities. On his return to the United States he worked from 1914 to 1916 as an assistant at the University of Texas and from 1917 to 1918 at the Sheffield Scientific School at Yale University . He then served briefly in the army before he went to the University of Georgia in 1920, where he accepted a position as associate professor . In 1923 he was promoted to full professor ( tenured professor ) and from 1944 to 1945 he briefly headed the mathematics department. He retired in 1956. For a long time he was one of only two professors in the Department of Mathematics.

During his time at the University of Georgia, Barrow mainly taught the introductory analysis courses . He studied iterated exponential functions and dealt with the mechanization of numerical calculations. In 1937 he published in the American Mathematical Monthly a solution to the problem 3740 posed two years earlier by Paul Erdös in the same place , which is known today as the Erdös-Mordell inequality . Barrow's proof of the inequality also provided a tightening that was later named after im.

Works

  • Defining an iterated exponential function
  • Can a robot calculate the table of logarithms? . In: The American Mathematical Monthly , Volume 49, No. 10 (Dec. 1942), pp. 671-673 ( JSTOR )
  • Paul Erdös, LJ Mordell, David F. Barrow: Solution to 3740 . In: The American Mathematical Monthly , Vol. 44, No. 4 (April, 1937), pp. 252-254 ( JSTOR )

Individual evidence

  1. ^ A b c d Thomas Brahana: The History of Mathematics at the University of Georgia . University of Georgia website (Section 4. 1900-1939 ) (accessed November 14, 2019)
  2. ^ Alexander Ostermann, Gerhard Wanner: Geometry by its History . Springer, 2012, ISBN 9783642291630 , pp. 222-224
personal data
SURNAME Barrow, David Francis
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American mathematician
DATE OF BIRTH November 14, 1888
PLACE OF BIRTH Athens , Georgia
DATE OF DEATH 4th February 1970