Frank Smithies

Frank Smithies (born March 10, 1912 in Edinburgh , † November 16, 2002 in Cambridge ) was a British mathematician.

Smithies studied from 1927 at the University of Edinburgh (where he was one of the best mathematics students of his year, who won some university prizes such as the Napier Medal), among others with Edmund Taylor Whittaker and at Cambridge University , where he studied with Godfrey Harold in 1936 Hardy received his PhD (The theory of linear integral equations). In 1935 he won the Rayleigh Prize. As a post-doctoral student , he spent two years at the Institute for Advanced Study with John von Neumann , whose lecture he had previously attended and who interested him in functional analysis. In 1938 he was back in England, doing research and teaching at St. John's College in Cambridge. In particular, he taught modern functional analysis there, which was not yet common in England at the time. Hardy, for example, had an aversion to abstract methods.

After his retirement in 1979 he dealt with the history of mathematics, including the construction of real numbers by Karl Weierstrass , the "rigor" of Augustin Louis Cauchy's methods in analysis, the history of function theory and a forgotten approach to the fundamental theorem of algebra by a certain James Woods 1798.

In 1961 he became a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh .

His PhD students include Graham Robert Allan , Harry Reuter , John Ringrose , Seymour Papert , David Garling, and Derek Burgess .

Fonts

• Integral Equations , Cambridge Tracts, Cambridge University Press 1958
• Cauchy and the creation of complex function theory , Cambridge UP 1997
• Cauchy's concept of rigor in analysis , Archive for History of Exact Sciences, Volume 36, 1986, pp. 41-61

Web links

• John J. O'Connor, Edmund F. Robertson :  Frank Smithies. In: MacTutor History of Mathematics archive .

Individual evidence

1. ^ Mathematics Genealogy Project