Henry Frederick Baker

Henry Frederick Baker , often quoted HF Baker, (* July 3, 1866 in Cambridge , † March 17, 1956 ibid) was a British mathematician who dealt with algebraic geometry .

Baker was the son of a butler . He studied mathematics from 1884 on a scholarship at St. John's College in Cambridge, including with Arthur Cayley . In 1887 he became Senior Wrangler in the Tripos exams and in 1889 a Fellow of St. John's College. In the same year he won the Smith Prize . 1903 to 1914 he was there Cayley Lecturer and then until 1936 Lowndean Professor of Geometry and Astronomy. In 1936 he retired.

Since staying with Felix Klein in Göttingen , he has been concerned with functional theory on Riemann surfaces and published the 1897 monograph Abel's Theorem and the allied theory . His occupation with the algebraic geometry of the Italian school was reflected in the six-volume series of textbooks Principles of Geometry (the last two volumes, the first are devoted to classical geometry).

He was the editor of the works of James Joseph Sylvester .

The Baker-Campbell-Hausdorff formula in the theory of Lie algebras is named after him.

In 1898 he became a Fellow of the Royal Society , whose New Year's Medal he received in 1910. In 1905 he received the De Morgan Medal of the London Mathematical Society . 1910/1911 he was President of the London Mathematical Society. In 1913 he became President of Section A of the British Association . Since 1943 he was a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh .

Fonts

• Principles of Geometry (6 volumes), The University Press, Cambridge 1922 to 1925
• Abel's theorem and the allied theory, including the theory of the theta functions , The University Press, Cambridge 1897, 1995
• An introduction to the theory of multiply periodic functions , The University Press, Cambridge 1907
• An Introduction to Plane Geometry , 1943, 1971

Web links

• John J. O'Connor, Edmund F. Robertson :  Henry Frederick Baker. In: MacTutor History of Mathematics archive .