Frank Bonsall

Frank Featherstone Bonsall (born March 31, 1920 in Crouch End, London , † February 22, 2011 in Harrogate ) was a British mathematician who dealt with analysis.

Bonsall grew up in the small town of Welwyn Garden Town north of London. From 1938 he studied mathematics at Oxford University (Merton College), but this was interrupted from 1940 by military service with the Royal Engineers, which continued until 1946 in India. During this time, I studied self-study using Titchmarsh's Theory of Functions . In 1946 he continued his studies at Oxford. In 1947 he married his fellow student Jill Patrick. After graduation, he was a temporary lecturer at the University of Edinburgh , where he met Werner Wolfgang Rogosinski , who he then followed to the University of Newcastle (where Rogosinski was a professor) as a lecturer. After a stay in the USA in 1950/51 at Oklahoma State University in Stillwater (where he worked with Alfred Goldie and Morris Marden ), he turned to functional analysis . In 1959 he became professor in Newcastle, succeeding Rogosinski, and in 1965 McLaurin professor in Edinburgh (this chair had just been established at the time). There he founded a school of functional analysts around the inter-university North British Functional Analysis Seminar founded by himself, John Ringrose and Barry Johnson. In 1984 he retired and lived in Harrogate. Even after that he was mathematically active at the universities of Leeds (where he was an honorary fellow) and York (whose honorary doctorate he received in 1990). Among other things, he was visiting professor at Yale University (1965) and at the Tata Institute in Bombay.

In 1966 he became a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh and in 1970 of the Royal Society . In 1966 he received the Senior Berwick Prize of the London Mathematical Society, of which he was a member. In 1976/77 he was President of the Edinburgh Mathematical Society.

He was a passionate mountaineer (especially in Scotland) and garden lover.

His brother Sir Arthur Bonsall was director of the Government Communications Headquarters in Cheltenham from 1973 to 1978.

Fonts

with J. Duncan Numerical ranges of operators on normed spaces and of elements of normed algebras , Cambridge University Press 1971
with J. Duncan Complete normed algebras , Springer Verlag 1973
with J. Duncan Numerical Ranges II , Cambridge University Press 1973
Lectures on some fixed point theorems of functional analysis , Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, Bombay 1962, Online, pdf

Web links

personal data
SURNAME	Bonsall, Frank
ALTERNATIVE NAMES	Bonsall, Frank Featherstone (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION	British mathematician
DATE OF BIRTH	March 31, 1920
PLACE OF BIRTH	Crouch End, London
DATE OF DEATH	February 22, 2011
Place of death	Harrogate