Frank Nelson Cole

Frank Nelson Cole (born September 20, 1861 in Ashland , Massachusetts , † May 26, 1926 in New York City ) was an American mathematician.

Live and act

Cole studied from 1878 to 1882 at Harvard University and from 1883 to 1885 in Leipzig , where he heard lectures from Felix Klein . Cole submitted his doctoral thesis written under the guidance of Klein on his return to Harvard and received his doctorate there in 1886. After teaching at Harvard from 1885 to 1887, he married Martha Streiff from Göttingen in 1888 and became a professor at the University of Michigan in the same year . From 1895 he worked at Columbia University . In the same year he also became executive director of the American Mathematical Society and editor of the Bulletin of the American Mathematical Society .

Cole published a number of important articles on algebra and number theory , including - at the suggestion of Otto Hölder - a list of all simple groups of the order ≤ 600. In addition, in 1892 he published an article on the diurnal course of air pressure .

Eric Temple Bell is one of Cole's students .

Cole lecture

In 1903, at a meeting of the American Mathematical Society, he presented the factors of the Mersenne number 2 ⁶⁷ -1 ( M _{67 for} short ) in an unusual lecture . As early as 1876, Édouard Lucas had shown that this number, contrary to Marin Mersenne's statement , is not a prime number . However, prime factors of this number remained unknown.

During his lecture, Cole went to the blackboard without a word and calculated the value of M ₆₇ . Then he wrote the problem 193.707.721 · 761.838.257.287 on the other side of the board. He carried out the tedious multiplication by hand and finally showed that both calculations led to the same result of 147,573,952,589,676,412,927. Without having spoken a word, Cole went back to his seat while his colleagues stood up and applauded him. Cole later confessed that he spent three years doing the weekend calculations to find the factors.

Cole price

After his death, for the first time in 1928, the American Mathematical Society awarded the Cole Prize (English: Frank Nelson Cole Prize ) for outstanding mathematical achievements in his memory .

Fonts

Eugen Netto (translated by FN Cole): The theory of substitutions and its applications to algebra. Ann Arbor, Michigan, 1892, online

swell

Marcus Du Sautoy: The music of the prime numbers: On the trail of the greatest puzzle in mathematics . Beck, Munich 2004, ISBN 3-406-52320-X , p. 275 ( limited preview in the Google book search).
JJ O'Connor and EF Robertson: Frank Nelson Cole , accessed October 4, 2010
TS Fiske: Frank Nelson Cole. (PDF; 489 kB) In: Bulletin of the AMS. Volume 33, 1927, pp. 773-777
Steve Batterson: Bôcher, Osgood, and the Ascendance of American Mathematics at Harvard. (PDF; 751 kB) In: Notices of the AMS. Volume 56, 2009, pp. 916–928 (especially p. 920, also contains a Photo Coles)
Ronald Solomon: A brief history of the classification of finite simple groups. (PDF; 459 kB) In: Bulletin of the AMS (New Series). Volume 38, 2001, pp. 315-352

Web links

Individual evidence

↑ See article by Ronald Solomon.
^ According to the entry in the Mathematics Genealogy Project , Cole and Cassius Keyser were supervisors of Bell's doctoral thesis. See also the discussion in Constance Reid : The search for ET Bell: also known as John Taine , Mathematical Association of America, 1993, p. 145 .

personal data
SURNAME	Cole, Frank Nelson
BRIEF DESCRIPTION	American mathematician
DATE OF BIRTH	September 20, 1861
PLACE OF BIRTH	Ashland , Massachusetts
DATE OF DEATH	May 26, 1926
Place of death	New York City , New York (State)

[1] See article by Ronald Solomon.

[2] According to the entry in the Mathematics Genealogy Project , Cole and Cassius Keyser were supervisors of Bell's doctoral thesis. See also the discussion in Constance Reid : The search for ET Bell: also known as John Taine , Mathematical Association of America, 1993, p. 145 .