Harold Edwards (mathematician)

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Harold Mortimer Edwards Junior (born August 6, 1936 in Champaign (Illinois) ) is an American mathematician and mathematician.

Life

Edwards studied at the University of Wisconsin (Bachelor 1956) and Columbia University (Master 1957). In 1961 he received his doctorate from Harvard University with Raoul Bott ( Applications of Intersection Theory to Boundary Value Problems ), where he was subsequently a Peirce Instructor. In 1962 he went back to Columbia University, where he was assistant professor from 1963 to 1966. From 1966 to 1969 he was an assistant professor at New York University , then an associate professor until 1979 and professor from 1979 until his retirement in 2002.

He was best known for two textbooks on number theory that follow the historical-genetic method: Riemann's Zeta Function (Academic Press 1974, with an English translation of Riemann's essay from 1859), a standard work, and Fermat's Last Theorem - A Genetic Introduction to Algebraic Number Theory (Springer 1977), in which he follows the historical traces up to Ernst Eduard Kummer , who developed the ideal theory to solve Fermat's great theorem. He has published numerous works on the history of mathematics (especially on Kummer, Richard Dedekind , Leopold Kronecker ). His book Advanced Calculus systematically uses differential forms. In his book on linear algebra, and in most of his books in general, he takes an algorithmic, constructive approach.

In 2007 he introduced a new normal form of elliptical curves, in which the law of addition of points on the curve is expressed particularly simply ( Edwards curve , affine Edwards coordinates). Edwards was referring to the work of Leonhard Euler and Carl Friedrich Gauß . Edward's normal form was also used in the cryptography of elliptic curves ( Tanja Lange , Daniel J. Bernstein ).

In 1980 he won the Leroy P. Steele Prize . In 1981/82 he was a Guggenheim Fellow. In 2005 he received the Albert Leon Whiteman Prize from the American Mathematical Society. In 1978 he was the first editor of The Mathematical Intelligencer with Bruce Chandler .

Edwards is married to TV journalist and writer Betty Rollin and lives in New York City . He is a member of the New York Academy of Sciences . He is a fellow of the American Mathematical Society .

Fonts

  • Riemann's Zeta Function . Academic Press, 1974, Dover Paperback, 2001, ISBN 0-486-41740-9 .
  • Fermat's Last Theorem. Springer, 1977, ISBN 0-387-95002-8 .
  • Galois Theory. Springer, Graduate Texts in Mathematics, 1984, ISBN 0-387-90980-X .
  • Divisor Theory. Birkhäuser, 1990, ISBN 0-8176-3448-7 .
  • Advanced Calculus. Boston 1969, Birkhäuser, 1994, ISBN 0-8176-3707-9 .
  • Linear algebra. Birkhäuser, 1995, ISBN 0-8176-4370-2 .
  • Essays in Constructive Mathematics. Springer, 2005, ISBN 0-387-21978-1 (Abel's theorem, Galoistheorie , Gauss's theory of binary quadratic forms), doi : 10.1007 / b138656 .
  • Higher Arithmetic - An Algorithmic Introduction to Number Theory. AMS, Providence 2008, ISBN 978-0-8218-4439-7 .
  • An appreciation of Kronecker. In: Mathematical Intelligencer. Vol. 9, 1987, issue 1.
  • Kronecker's arithmetical theory of algebraic quantities. In: Annual report of the German Mathematicians Association, Vol. 94, 1992, p. 130 ( online ).
  • Fermat's Last Theorem. In: Scientific American. Vol. 239, 1978, p. 104.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Mathematics Genealogy Project
  2. ^ Edwards, A normal form for elliptic curves , Bulletin AMS, Volume 44, 2007, pp. 393-422, online
personal data
SURNAME Edwards, Harold
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Edwards, Harold M .; Edwards, Harold Mortimer
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American mathematician
DATE OF BIRTH August 6, 1936
PLACE OF BIRTH Champaign , Illinois , United States