David Aries

David Vernon Widder (born March 25, 1898 in Harrisburg , † July 8, 1990 ) was an American mathematician who studied analysis.

Life

Widder studied from 1916 at Harvard University (among other things with Maxime Bôcher ), where he graduated magna cum laude (Bachelor) in 1920, after a break as a computer at the Ballistics Research Institute of the US Army in Aberdeen Proving Ground during World War I. In 1921 he was on a scholarship in Europe (France, Italy, England), in 1923 he made his master's degree at Harvard. In 1924 he received his doctorate under George David Birkhoff (his mentor Bocher succumbed to the worldwide flu epidemic in 1918) (Theorems of Mean Value and Trigonometric Interpolation). He then taught at Bryn Mawr College (interrupted by further studies at the Rice Institute in Houston and the University of Chicago ), where he became professor and chairman of the mathematics faculty. In 1931 he became an assistant professor at Harvard, where he became a professor in 1937. In 1932, Widder was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences . During the difficult war years from 1942 to 1948, when many professors were absent and the university was busy teaching elementary mathematics for the US military, he was chairman of the mathematics faculty there. He published his last work in 1979.

Widder (similar to Gustav Doetsch in Germany ) mainly dealt with the theory of the Laplace transformation and its extensions, with particular connections to the theory of the Dirichlet series. He also studied the applications of the Laplace transformation in important differential equations in mathematical physics such as the heat conduction equation.

Buck was a co-founder of the Duke Mathematical Journal. He also wrote a well-known analysis textbook.

His PhD students include R. Creighton Buck , Ralph Boas , Harry Pollard, and Donald Newman . He had been married to the mathematician Vera Ames since 1939, who like him was also a passionate piano player.

Fonts

Advanced Calculus, Prentice Hall 1947, Dover 1989
The Laplace transform, Princeton University Press, Oxford University Press 1941
An introduction to transform theory, Academic Press 1971
The heat equation, Academic Press 1975
with Isidore Isaac Hirschman: The convolution transform, Princeton University Press 1955, Dover 2005

Web links

Individual evidence

↑ In the obituary by Birkhoff, Gleason and Mackey at Harvard cited under the web links, his qualities as a teacher are emphasized, his reputation as a "Polished Blackboard Technician" and the opinion of an unofficial university guide: "Professor Widder could teach calculus to a rhinoceros"

personal data
SURNAME	Aries, David
ALTERNATIVE NAMES	Aries, David Vernon
BRIEF DESCRIPTION	American mathematician
DATE OF BIRTH	March 25, 1898
PLACE OF BIRTH	Harrisburg
DATE OF DEATH	July 8, 1990

[1] In the obituary by Birkhoff, Gleason and Mackey at Harvard cited under the web links, his qualities as a teacher are emphasized, his reputation as a "Polished Blackboard Technician" and the opinion of an unofficial university guide: "Professor Widder could teach calculus to a rhinoceros"