John Edensor Littlewood

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John Edensor Littlewood (born June 9, 1885 in Rochester (Kent) , † September 6, 1977 in Cambridge ) was an English mathematician who mainly worked in analysis .

Live and act

Littlewood attended St Paul's School in London , where he was a student of Francis Macaulay . He then studied at Trinity College , Cambridge, where he was a professor for most of his life. In 1905 he was Senior Wrangler (that is, first) in the mathematical " Tripos " - at that time they determined the career in Cambridge, especially the achievement of the coveted "Fellow" status at one of the university colleges (many senior Wranglers also went in politics or law), preferably Newton's "Trinity College". The mathematics studies at Cambridge were specially tailored to these exams, for which additional tutors like Routh, who wrote books on mechanics as well, was otherwise not a professor, but the best-known tutor for the Tripos. Littlewood saw this as a sporting challenge, even if he didn't think much of the Tripos system and saw it as one of the reasons for the backwardness of English mathematics at the time. At least he proved how the prime number theorem with error term followed from the Riemann Hypothesis . In his first research he examined the Riemann Hypothesis , as he communicates in his "Miscellany", rather out of naivety and as a sign of the isolation of the English mathematicians at the time. On the other hand, he advised young mathematicians to try their hand at difficult problems - they might not solve them, but they might find other interesting results.

Around 1910 his fruitful and long-term collaboration with Godfrey Harold Hardy began . The two series examined , trigonometric series , the Riemann zeta function , inequalities and other areas of analysis. Together they developed the powerful "Circle Method" (also known as the Hardy-Littlewood method) in analytical number theory. Their collaboration, with Littlewood often doing the hard analytical work and Hardy doing the "architecture", became a proverbial one: the Danish analyst Harald Bohr joked that there were only three great English mathematicians at the moment, Hardy, Littlewood and Hardy-Littlewood. When a German mathematician remarked that he had taken Littlewood to be Hardy's pseudonym, which he used for his minor work, Littlewood took this outwardly with humor. They mastered English mathematics well into the 1950s and formed a large school. In the 1920s her work was also fertilized by the ideas of the brilliant but imperfectly trained Indian mathematician S. Ramanujan .

From the 1930s onwards he investigated - partly in collaboration with Mary Cartwright - also nonlinear differential equations that have applications in the theory of electrical oscillating circuits. He worked on harmonic analysis with Raymond Paley , who had an early accident skiing in the Rocky Mountains .

His PhD students include Harold Davenport , Sarvadaman Chowla , Donald Spencer , Stanley Skewes , Albert Ingham , AOL Atkin , Peter Swinnerton-Dyer , Edward Collingwood and (with Hardy) Ramanujan.

Littlewood was stocky and very athletic. In his youth he was an excellent gymnast and cricket player, later he was a passionate mountaineer and skier and enjoyed hiking. Like Hardy, he enjoyed watching cricket games. He suffered from depression all his life, which prevented him, for example, from playing a more active role in organizations. Even during his time as President of the London Mathematical Society, he never chaired a meeting, but instead let his deputy chair it. He later successfully took medication for his depression. He loved classical music (but according to his own words he would only listen to Bach, Beethoven, Mozart, since life was too short for other things) and as an adult he taught himself to play the piano.

Others

Littlewood never married but had a daughter, Ann Streatfeild. For a long time he only referred to her as his niece, to whom he was always fond and with whom he often went on vacation. Later he had a remorse about the strict secrecy of his fatherhood because he worried about her future (she later married the Swiss Carl Johannsen). Béla Bollobás and his wife finally convinced him in the 1970s to make his paternity public, which he also did one evening in the university meeting room by simply speaking of her about his daughter instead of his niece. The next morning he wondered why no one made a big fuss about it.

Honors

In 1915 he was elected as a member (" Fellow ") in the Royal Society , which in 1929 awarded him the Royal Medal , 1943 the Sylvester Medal and 1958 the Copley Medal . From 1941 to 1943 he was President of the London Mathematical Society , from which he received the De Morgan Medal in 1938 and the Senior Berwick Prize in 1960 .

He was a member of the Göttingen (1925), Danish, Swedish, Dutch (1950) and French (1957) Academies of Sciences.

The main belt asteroid (26993) Littlewood , discovered on December 3, 1997, was named after him.

Fonts

  • A mathematicians miscellany . Methuen, London 1953 and numerous other editions (his intellectual autobiography, written with subtle humor).

literature

Quotes

A good mathematical joke is better, and better mathematics, than a dozen mediocre papers. (Eng .: a good math joke is better, and even better math, than a dozen mediocre papers )

It is possible for a mathematician to be "too strong" for a given occasion. he forces through, where another might be driven to a different, and possible more fruitful approach. (So ​​a rock climber might force a dreadful crack, instead of finding a subtle and delicate route.) ( Eng . : It is possible that a mathematician approaches a problem with “too strong means”; he forces the solution while someone else chooses a possibly more fertile side path (for example, a climber can venture into a gap, but he can also choose a more elegant route). )

supporting documents

  1. ↑ Try a hard problem. You may not solve it, but you will prove something else. Littlewood quotes in the McTutor Archives
  2. ^ Mathematics Genealogy Project at Littlewood
  3. ↑ Littlewood citations in McTutor archive
  4. ↑ Steven Krantz Mathematical Apocrypha , MAA 2002, p. 29.
  5. ^ Entry to Littlewood; John Edensor (1885-1977) in the Archives of the Royal Society , London
  6. ↑ Holger Krahnke: The members of the Academy of Sciences in Göttingen 1751-2001 (= Treatises of the Academy of Sciences in Göttingen, Philological-Historical Class. Volume 3, Vol. 246 = Treatises of the Academy of Sciences in Göttingen, Mathematical-Physical Class. Episode 3, vol. 50). Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen 2001, ISBN 3-525-82516-1 , p. 153.
  7. ^ List of members since 1666: Letter L. Académie des sciences, accessed on January 14, 2020 (French).
  8. ↑ Littlewood A mathematicians miscellany , Methuen 1953, p. 2.
  9. ^ A mathematician´s miscellany , quoted from: McTutor Archive, Quotes from Littlewood

Web links

personal data
SURNAME Littlewood, John Edensor
BRIEF DESCRIPTION English mathematician
DATE OF BIRTH June 9, 1885
PLACE OF BIRTH Rochester (Kent)
DATE OF DEATH September 6, 1977
Place of death Cambridge