Harry Vandiver

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Harry Schultz Vandiver (born October 21, 1882 in Philadelphia , † January 9, 1973 in Austin , Texas ) was an American mathematician who dealt with number theory.

Vandiver attended a few courses at the University of Pennsylvania in 1904/05, but developed an aversion to school during his high school years and preferred working as a broker in his father's company than graduating. He taught himself math, however, and regularly solved problems (and submitted new problems) in the American Mathematical Monthly. In 1904 he published number theory works with George Birkhoff, among others . He also studied the work of Ernst Eduard Kummer in connection with the Fermat problem . During the First World War, he worked in the US Navy reserves from 1917 to 1919 . In 1919, on the recommendation and advice of Birkhoff, he became an instructor at Cornell University - although he did not meet the formal requirements, he had already published a number of papers. In the summer of 1919 he also worked with Leonard Dickson in Chicago on his History of the Theory of Numbers . In 1924 he became an associate professor at the University of Texas , where he was given a full professorship in 1925 and remained until his retirement in 1966. In 1947 he was appointed Distinguished Service Professor of Applied Mathematics and Astronomy there. In 1952, using a computer at the National Bureau of Standards in Los Angeles, he proved that the Fermat problem had no solution for prime numbers smaller than 2000, after he had previously shown the correctness for numbers smaller than 600 with his students and "by hand" .

In addition to his work on the Fermat conjecture, he also worked on fields of division of circles , factoring methods , reciprocity laws, finite fields , semigroups and half rings and the theory of algebras .

In 1931 he received the Cole Prize for his work on Fermat's Conjecture . 1934/35 he was vice president of the American Mathematical Society . In 1934 he was accepted into the National Academy of Sciences . In 1946 he received an honorary doctorate from the University of Pennsylvania.

He had been married since 1923 and had one son, Frank Vandiver, who became president of Texas A&M University . He was staying in a hotel in Austin and had a large collection of classic records.

A still open conjecture about the class number of circular subdivisions is named after him (Vandiver's conjecture that the class number of the maximum real sub-field of the circular subdivision is not divisible by the prime number ), but was already established by Kummer in 1849 in a letter to Leopold Kronecker . The conjecture plays an important role in the theory of the division of circles (and of K-groups). Vandiver thought he had also proven that the first part of the Fermat conjecture follows from it, but Iwasawa found a gap here.

literature

  • Leo Corry Number crunching vs. number theory: computers and FLT, from Kummer to SWAC (1850-1960), and beyond , Archive History Exact Sciences, 62, 2008, 393-455

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Vandiver, Fermat's last theorem and the second factor in the cyclotomic class number, Bulletin AMS, Volume 40, 1934, 118-126, online
  2. ↑ Serge Lang Units and Class Groups in Number Theory and Algebraic Geometry , Bulletin AMS, Series 2, Volume 6, 1982, p. 264. Walter Feit did not understand Vandiver's proof and asked Iwasawa.
personal data
SURNAME Vandiver, Harry
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Vandiver, Harry Schultz (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American mathematician
DATE OF BIRTH October 21, 1882
PLACE OF BIRTH Philadelphia
DATE OF DEATH January 9, 1973
Place of death Austin , Texas