Frederic Bohnenblust

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Henri Frederic Bohnenblust (born March 22, 1906 in Neuchâtel NE ; † March 30, 2000 in Santa Barbara (California) ) was an originally Swiss , then American mathematician .

Bohnenblust graduated from ETH Zurich in 1928 and received his doctorate from Princeton University under Einar Hille in 1931 (On the Absolute Convergence of Dirichlet Series). He stayed at Princeton University until 1945 (interrupted by military research in World War II, among others with Theodore von Kármán ), was a year at Indiana University and from 1946 professor at Caltech , where he headed the mathematics faculty in the early 1950s, 1956 to 1970 was Dean for Graduate Studies and was retired in 1974.

He was known for his teaching in mathematics, especially to undergraduates, and was therefore also featured by Time Magazine in 1966 as one of 10 outstanding university teachers in the USA. A committee at Caltech under his leadership established a Calculus curriculum for the university, from which the textbook Calculus by Tom Apostol emerged. Bohnenblust was an early advocate for the use of computers in teaching.

As a mathematician, he dealt with functional analysis . The Bohnenblust and Sobczyk theorem is named after him (an extension of Hahn-Banach's theorem to include complex vector spaces). He also dealt with game theory .

An asteroid (15938 bean blossom) was named after him by Paolo Comba (one of his PhD students ) in 1997.

literature

  • Obituary in Engineering and Science, 2000, No. 1, pp. 37f

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Frederic Bohnenblust in the Mathematics Genealogy Project (English)Template: MathGenealogyProject / Maintenance / id used
  2. ↑ Bohnenblust, Sobczyk, Extensions of functionals on complex linear spaces, Bulletin AMS, Volume 44, 1938, pp. 91-93, online
personal data
SURNAME Bean blossom, Frederic
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Bohnenblust, Henri Frederic (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American mathematician
DATE OF BIRTH March 22, 1906
PLACE OF BIRTH Neuchâtel NE
DATE OF DEATH March 30, 2000
Place of death Santa Barbara (California)