George Temple

George Frederick James Temple (born December 2, 1901 in London , † January 30, 1992 in Quarr Abbey , Isle of Wight ) was an English mathematician , physicist and monk .

Live and act

George Temple went to school in London and from 1918 studied physics in evening classes at Birkbeck College . In 1922 he completed his bachelor's degree and in 1924 became an assistant (demonstrator) for mathematics at Imperial College London with Sydney Chapman (originally he wanted to go to Alfred North Whitehead , because he was concerned with the theory of relativity, but he had accepted a position at Harvard University ) . In 1925 he was at Cambridge University with Arthur Eddington . In 1930 he became a reader at Imperial College and in 1932 professor of mathematics at King's College London .

During World War II he worked at the Royal Air Force Aviation Research Center in Farnborough on aerodynamic studies, for which he was awarded the Order of the British Empire (CBE). In 1945 he was back at his old university, but also advised the Aviation Ministry on civil flight control. In 1953 he succeeded Chapman Sedleian Professor of Natural Philosophy at Oxford University , where he remained until his retirement in 1968. In 1983 he became a Benedictine monk and moved to Quarr Abbey on the Isle of Wight.

Temple worked on various areas of theoretical physics, first on relativity and quantum mechanics, then on aerodynamics. In analysis he examined, among other things, the Lebesgue integral and distributions . In 1981 he published a book on the history of mathematics in the 20th century, which, in his own words, had cost him 10 years of study. This highly acclaimed, not all that extensive (316 pages) history of mathematics from 1870 to 1970 is specially written for mathematicians. It only covers areas in which he has worked himself, including applications and mathematical logic. When he died, he left a manuscript on the fundamentals of mathematics.

1943 Temple was accepted as a member (" Fellow ") in the Royal Society , which in 1970 awarded him the Sylvester Medal . 1951 to 1953 he was President of the London Mathematical Society and 1933-1935 and 1953/54 its Vice-President. In 1958 he gave a plenary lecture at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Edinburgh (Linearization and Delinearization).

Fonts

• An introduction to quantum theory. 1931.
• The general principles of quantum theory. 1934.
• Rayleigh's Principle and its application to engineering. London 1933.
• An introduction to fluid mechanics. 1958.
• The structure of the Lebesgue integration theory. Oxford, Clarendon Press 1971.
• 100 years of Mathematics - a personal view. London, Duckworth, Springer-Verlag, 1981, ISBN 0-7156-1130-5 .

Web links

• John J. O'Connor, Edmund F. Robertson :  George Temple. In: MacTutor History of Mathematics archive .
• Obituary by Anellis in Modern Logic