Harold Davenport
Harold Davenport (born October 30, 1907 in Huncoat , Lancashire , England , † June 9, 1969 in Cambridge , England) was an English mathematician who mainly worked in number theory.
Live and act
Harold Davenport studied at the University of Manchester (until 1927) and at Trinity College, Cambridge University (including with John Edensor Littlewood , where he worked on the number theory topic of the distribution of square residues ).
As a “ Research Fellow ” he went to the University of Göttingen in 1932/33 and to Helmut Hasse at the University of Marburg , which at that time was a “stronghold of number theory”. In Cambridge, however, analytical number theory in the style of Godfrey Harold Hardy and Littlewood and their "circle method" was practiced. There the Hasse-Davenport relations for Gauss sums were created . Davenport also met his future co-author Hans Heilbronn here . However, he could never quite overcome his aversion to algebraic methods. His remark to Hasse that he should try them out on the Riemann hypothesis, for example, and thus show what they are good for, prompted Hasse to prove it in the case of the elliptic curves.
In 1937 he went to the University of Manchester and worked mainly on Diophantine approximations and the geometry of numbers. From 1950 he was the head of a school mainly in analytical number theory in England. 1957 to 1959 he was President of the London Mathematical Society . He taught at the University of Wales and University College London before becoming Rouse Ball Professor at Cambridge in 1958 .
Davenport is the author of the well-known introduction to number theory The higher arithmetic , which was first published in 1953.
In 1940 Davenport was elected as a member (" Fellow ") in the Royal Society , which in 1967 awarded him the Sylvester Medal . In 1950 he gave a plenary lecture at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Cambridge (Massachusetts) (Recent progress in the geometry of numbers) and in 1962 he was invited speaker at the ICM in Stockholm ( Homogeneous diophantine equations ).
Fonts
- The higher arithmetic - an introduction to the theory of numbers , 8th edition, Cambridge University Press 2008 (supplemented by James H. Davenport), first 1952 Hutchinson House, New York
- Analytic methods for diophantine equations and Diophantine inequalities 1962, 2nd edition (edited by TD Browning), Cambridge University Press 2005
- Multiplicative number theory , Markham Publishing, Chicago 1967, 3rd edition (edited by Hugh Montgomery ), Springer 2000
- Collected works , 4 vols., Academic Press 1977 (editors Bryan Birch , Heini Halberstam , Claude Rogers )
- Looking back , Journal London Mathematical Society Vol. 41, 1966, p. 1 (Memoirs)
- Davenport: On some recent advances in additive number theory , DMV annual report 1961.
- Davenport, Hasse: The zeros of the congruence function in certain cyclical cases , Journal Pure and Applied Math. 1935.
- Davenport: On certain exponential sums , Journal for Pure and Applied Mathematics 1933.
supporting documents
- ^ Entry on Davenport; Harold (1907-1969) in the Archives of the Royal Society , London
Web links
- John J. O'Connor, Edmund F. Robertson : Harold Davenport. In: MacTutor History of Mathematics archive .
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Davenport, Harold |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | English mathematician |
| DATE OF BIRTH | October 30, 1907 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Huncoat , England |
| DATE OF DEATH | June 9, 1969 |
| Place of death | Cambridge , England |