Jesse Douglas

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Jesse Douglas (born July 3, 1897 in New York , † October 7, 1965 ) was an American mathematician . In 1936 he was one of the first two mathematicians to be awarded the Fields Medal for solving the plateau problem of differential geometry .

Douglas won prizes in mathematics at City College in New York and studied from 1916 at Columbia University in New York a. a. with Edward Kasner . In 1920 he received his doctorate with a thesis on differential geometric calculus of variations . 1920–1926 he taught at Columbia College and published next to it. From 1926 to 1930 he attended Princeton , Harvard , Chicago , Paris and Göttingen Universities on a scholarship (1930).

In 1930 he solved - and independently of him Tibor Radó - the plateau problem that had already been posed by Lagrange in the 18th century. In doing so, the proof of the existence of a minimal surface for a given boundary should be provided. For this he received the Fields Medal and in 1943 the Bôcher Memorial Prize from the American Mathematical Society . Douglas and Rado solved this problem of the calculus of variations with the help of the Dirichlet principle by constructing a suitable functional (which, however, is not identical to the surface functional) whose minimum results in the minimum area. Douglas then studied a few more variants of the problem. Later he also worked in group theory.

From 1930 to 1937 he was at MIT . After various stations, u. a. In 1934/5 and 1938/9 at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton , he returned to City College in New York from 1955 . In 1933 he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences , in 1946 to the National Academy of Sciences .

He was married from 1940 and had a son.

Fonts

  • Solution of the problem of plateau. Trans. Amer. Math. Soc. 33 (1931), no. 1, 263-321.
  • Green's function and the problem of Plateau , American Journal of Mathematics, v. 61 (1939), pp. 545-589
  • The most general form of the problem of Plateau , American Journal of Mathematics, v. 61 (1939), pp. 590-608
  • Solution of the inverse problem of the calculus of variations , Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, v. 25 (1939), pp. 631-637.
  • Survey of the theory of integration , New York 1947

literature

  • The Problem of Plateau - A tribute to Jesse Douglas and Tibor Radó , (River Edge, NJ, 1992).
  • M. Struwe: Plateau's Problem and the Calculus of Variations , ISBN 0-691-08510-2
  • R. Bonnett, AT Fomenko: The Plateau Problem (Studies in the Development of Modern Mathematics) , ISBN 2-88124-702-4
  • M. Giaquinta, S. Hildebrandt: "Calculus of Variations", Volume I and Volume II, Springer Verlag

Web links

personal data
SURNAME Douglas, Jesse
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American mathematician
DATE OF BIRTH July 3, 1897
PLACE OF BIRTH new York
DATE OF DEATH October 7, 1965
Place of death new York