Frank Spitzer

Frank Spitzer (1970)

Frank Ludwig Spitzer (born July 24, 1926 in Vienna , † February 1, 1992 ) was an Austrian-American mathematician who dealt with probability theory .

biography

Spitzer was sent to a summer camp in Sweden by his Jewish parents - his father was a lawyer - because of the Nazi threat and stayed in Sweden during the Second World War. He attended school there, where he also learned Swedish, and began to study at the Royal Technical University in Stockholm. His parents and sister emigrated to the USA via France and North Africa and brought Spitzer there after the war. At the end of World War II, Spitzer enlisted in the US Army and did military service until 1947. He then studied mathematics at the University of Michigan , where he received his doctorate from Donald A. Darling in 1953 ( On the Theory of the Stochastic Processes Which Appear in the Description of Two Dimensional Brownian Motion By Polar Coordinates ). 1953 to 1958 he was at Caltech (Instructor from 1953, Assistant Professor from 1955), was from 1958 to 1961 Associate Professor at the University of Minnesota and taught from 1961 as a professor at Cornell University .

He was visiting scholar at the Institute for Advanced Study and the Mittag-Leffler Institute . He was a member of the National Academy of Sciences (1981) and a Guggenheim Fellow.

He researched random walks (about which he wrote a classic textbook), fluctuation theory , percolation theory , and the theory of interacting particle systems (Interacting Particle Systems), a research area of ​​stochastics.

literature

• Harry Kesten : Frank Spitzer, Biographical Memoirs National Academy 1996
• Richard Durrett , Harry Kesten (Eds.): Random walks, Brownian motion, and interacting particle systems: a festschrift in honor of Frank Spitzer , Birkhäuser 1991

Fonts

• Principles of Random Walk, Van Nostrand 1964, Springer 1976

Web links

• Brief biography at the AIP

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Frank Spitzer in the Mathematics Genealogy Project (English)