Harvey Cohn (mathematician)

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Harvey Cohn (born December 27, 1923 in New York City - † May 16, 2014 ) was an American mathematician.

Cohn studied mathematics and physics at City College of New York (CCNY) with a bachelor's degree in 1942 and at New York University with a master's degree in 1943. He served in World War II from 1944 to 1946 as an electronics technician in the US Navy and was born in 1948 at Harvard University with Lars Ahlfors (Diophantine aspects of Poincaré Theta Functions). In 1948 he became an assistant professor at Wayne State University and in 1955 he became an associate professor there. In 1956 he became associate professor and 1957 professor at Washington University in St. Louis, where he also headed the data center from 1956. From 1958 to 1971 he was a professor at the University of Arizona (Head of the Faculty of Mathematics 1958 to 1967) and from 1971 to 1996 he was Distinguished Professor of Mathematics at the City College of New York.

He was a pioneer in the use of computers in number theory and the theory of modular forms.

1954/55 he was visiting professor at Stanford University , 1976/77 at the University of Copenhagen and 1970/71 at the Institute for Advanced Study . From 1958 to 1970 he advised the data center at the Argonne National Laboratory . In the 1950s he advised and worked for the United States Atomic Energy Commission , the National Bureau of Standards, IBM (1957) and General Motors (1953). After his retirement he worked for the NSA and its IDA Center for Computing Sciences. From 1964 to 1967 he advised the autonomous University of Guadalajara. From 1964 to 1967 he was on the Survey Committee for Graduate Education of the Committee on the Undergraduate Program in Mathematics (CUPM) of the Mathematical Association of America.

He was a fellow of the American Mathematical Society . In 1942 he won the William Lowell Putnam Prize and in 1972 he was awarded the Townsend Harris Medal of CCNY Alumni.

He had been married to Bernice Blaufarb since 1951 and had a son and a daughter.

Fonts (selection)

  • Second Course in Number Theory, Wiley 1962 (reprinted in Dover 1980 as Advanced Number Theory)
  • Conformal mapping on Riemann surfaces, McGraw Hill 1967, Dover 1980
  • A Classical Invitation to Algebraic Numbers and Class Fields, Springer 1978 (with attachments by Olga Taussky-Todd )
  • Introduction to the construction of class fields, Cambridge University Press 1985
  • On the shape of the fundamental domain of the Hilbert modular group, Proc. Sympos. Pure Math., Vol. VIII, Amer. Math. Soc., Providence, RI, 1965, pp. 190-202
  • Markoff forms and primitive words, Mathematische Annalen, Volume 196, 1972, pp. 8-22
  • An explicit modular equation in two variables and Hilberts twelfth problem, Mathematics of Computation, Volume 38, 1982, pp. 227-236
  • Introductory remarks on complex multiplication, Int. J. of Math. And Math. Sci., Vol. 5, 1982, pp. 675-690

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Birth and career data according to American Men and Women of Science , Thomson Gale 2004
  2. ↑ Harvey Cohn in the Mathematics Genealogy Project (English)Template: MathGenealogyProject / Maintenance / id used
  3. ↑ Entry in the membership book of IAS 1980
personal data
SURNAME Cohn, Harvey
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American mathematician
DATE OF BIRTH December 27, 1923
PLACE OF BIRTH New York City
DATE OF DEATH May 16, 2014