Edward Kasner

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Edward Kasner (born April 2, 1878 in New York City , New York ; † January 7, 1955 ibid) was an American mathematician who mainly dealt with geometry and differential geometry .

Kasner studied from 1897 at Columbia University with Cassius Keyser , where he received his doctorate in 1900 with the thesis "The Invariant Theory of the Inversionsgruppe" (English. "The Invariant Theory of the Inversion Group"). He was the first Jew to get a job as a tutor at Columbia University. In 1917 Kasner was elected to the National Academy of Sciences .

He did a lot to popularize mathematics. He is known, for example, for his role in the invention of the word “ googol ”. In the 1920s, as he describes in his book with James Roy Newman (a mathematics-loving lawyer who was his student) Mathematics and the Imagination , he asked his then nine-year-old nephew to come up with a name for the number 10 100 (corresponds to a 1 with 100 zeros), who then invented the word “googol”. The name “ Google ” for the Internet search engine is a play on words with “googol”.

Rufus Isaacs is one of his PhD students .

literature

  • with James Roy Newman: Mathematics and the imagination , London, Penguin, New York, Simon and Schuster, 1940, 1967
  • with Supnick The Apollonian packing of circles , Proc.Nat.Acad.Sci. Vol. 24, 1943, p. 378, online here: [1]
  • with Harrison Voltaire on mathematics and the Horn angle , Scripta Mathematica Vol. 16, 1950, p. 13
  • Differential-geometric aspects of dynamics , in C. Carpelan, A. Parpola P. Koskikallio (Ed.): The Logarithmic potential and other monographs . New York: Chelsea, 1980, pp. 235–263 (first 1934)
  • Geometrical theorems on Einstein's cosmological equations , American Journal of Mathematics Vol. 43, 1921, p. 217

Web links

swell

  1. ^ Kasner, Newman, Mathematics and the imagination, London: Bell 1950, p. 23
  2. ↑ Jeff Miller, Earliest Known Uses of Some of the Words of Mathematics (G) , accessed November 27, 2019. Kasner also mentioned the name in his article New Names in Mathematics, Scripta Mathematica, Volume 5, 1938, pp. 5-14
  3. ^ The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine
personal data
SURNAME Kasner, Edward
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American mathematician
DATE OF BIRTH April 2, 1878
PLACE OF BIRTH New York City , New York
DATE OF DEATH January 7, 1955
Place of death New York City , New York