Fritz John

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Fritz John (born June 14, 1910 in Berlin , † February 10, 1994 in New Rochelle , New York ) was a German -American mathematician.

Fritz John (left) with Jürgen Moser , Oberwolfach 1961
Fritz John, 1984

Life

John was born as the son of Hermann Jacobson-John and Hedwig, b. Bürgel born in Berlin. He studied from 1929 to 1933 in Göttingen , where he was influenced by Richard Courant , among others . After Hitler came to power in 1933, he saw no future for himself as a “non- Aryan ” in Nazi Germany and decided to go to England.

In 1934 John published his first paper on Morse theory . In the same year he received his doctorate at the University of Göttingen under Courant ( determination of a function from its integrals over certain manifolds ) with whose help he came to Cambridge for a year .

In 1935 John was appointed assistant professor at the University of Kentucky and in the same year emigrated to the United States , where he obtained citizenship in 1941. He stayed in Kentucky until 1946, where he was released from 1943 to 1945 from his work for research at the Ballistic Research Laboratory of the Aberdeen Proving Ground, Maryland . In 1946 he was given a permanent position ( Associate Professorship ) and in 1978 the Courant Chair at the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences at New York University , which he held until his retirement in 1981.

In the 1940s and 1950s he worked on the Radon transform with a special focus on its application in the field of linear partial differential equations and convex geometry . The Fritz-John conditions in nonlinear optimization are named after him (established by him in 1948).

In 1964 he was elected to the National Academy of Sciences , 1974 a member of the Leopoldina . In 1981 he stopped his work, but continued his work on non-linear wave equations .

In the course of his career he has received many prizes and awards. In 1955 he received a Fulbright lectureship at the University of Göttingen and several travel grants from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation between 1963 and 1970. He received, among other things, the Birkhoff Prize for Applied Mathematics in 1973, the Leroy P. Steele Prize of the American Mathematical Society in 1982 and the Radon Medal of the Austrian Academy of Sciences in 1992. In 1984 he was a MacArthur Fellow . In 1966 he was invited speaker at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Moscow ( The effect of geometry on elastic behavior ).

These are named after him John ellipsoid , the John-area (English. John domain) and the Fritz-John conditions .

Sergiu Klainerman is one of his PhD students .

literature

  • Stefan Hildebrandt Remarks on the life and work of Fritz John , Comm. on Pure Applied Math. Vol. 51, pp. 971-989
  • S. Gindikin and P. Michor: Preface , in: 75 Years of Radon Transform, S. Gindikin and P. Michor, eds., International Press Incorporated (1994), p 1, ISBN 1-57146-008-X (on the Radon medal)

Fonts

  • Fritz John Lectures on advanced numerical analysis , Springer Verlag 1971
  • Fritz John Partial differential equations , Springer Verlag, 4th edition 1982
  • with Richard Courant: Introduction to calculus and analysis , 2 volumes, Springer Verlag 1989
  • Jürgen Moser (editor) Fritz John. Collected Papers , 2 volumes, Birkhäuser 1985
  • Fritz John Memories of Student Days in Göttingen in Michael Atiyah u. a. Miscellanea Mathematica , Springer Verlag 1991

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Mathematics Genealogy Project
  2. ↑ see e.g. BO Martio, FW Gehring, K. Hag: Quasihyperbolic geodesics in John domains , Mathematica Scandinavica, Volume 65 (1989), pp. 75-92
personal data
SURNAME John, Fritz
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American mathematician of German descent
DATE OF BIRTH June 14, 1910
PLACE OF BIRTH Berlin
DATE OF DEATH February 10, 1994
Place of death New Rochelle , New York