John Macnaghten Whittaker
John Macnaghten Whittaker (called Jack Whittaker ; born March 7, 1905 in Cambridge , † January 29, 1984 in Sheffield ) was a British mathematician.
He was the son of the well-known mathematician Edmund Taylor Whittaker . The family moved to Dublin in 1906 and to Edinburgh in 1912. Whittaker studied from 1920 at the University of Edinburgh and from 1923 at Trinity College in Cambridge . 1927 to 1929 he was an assistant lecturer at the University of Edinburgh, where his father taught and where he obtained his doctorate degree (D. Sc.). He was then a lecturer and fellow at Pembroke College , Cambridge. From 1933 he was a professor at Liverpool University . After the Second World War, he increasingly took on administrative tasks and was Vice Chancellor of the University of Sheffield in 1953 , where he remained until his retirement in 1965. But he still gave lectures in mathematics in Sheffield afterwards. Among other things, he was visiting professor at Cairo University , with which he had been in contact since his time as an officer in World War II, and in Tehran .
Whittaker dealt mainly with function theory , for example with the value distribution theory of Rolf Nevanlinna and interpolation theory. The Whittaker constant in the theory of whole functions is named after him, although the corresponding theorem comes from the Japanese mathematician Takenaka (which Whittaker correctly attributed to him). The Whittaker constant, the exact value of which is unknown, is the lower limit for the radius of a circular disk D in the complex plane in which a whole function exists (with an additional requirement for its growth) that in D as well as all its derivatives has at least one zero. Some of his early work also deals with quantum mechanics .
With his father he played a role in the sampling theorem , which is therefore sometimes named not only after Claude Shannon , but also after Whittaker and Vladimir Kotelnikow .
In 1929 he received the Smith Prize , in 1949 the Adams Prize . In 1928 he became a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh and in 1949 the Royal Society .
He had been married since 1933 and had two sons.
Fonts
- Interpolatory function theory, Cambridge University Press 1935, New York 1964
- Series of Polynomials, Cairo 1944
- Sur les Séries de Base de Polynomes Quelconques, 1949
Web links
- John J. O'Connor, Edmund F. Robertson : John Macnaghten Whittaker. In: MacTutor History of Mathematics archive .
References
- ↑ Introduced in his book Interpolation function theory 1935
- ^ Abstract of a work by Sheila MacIntyre from 1947 on the estimation of Whittaker's constant
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Whittaker, John Macnaghten |
| ALTERNATIVE NAMES | Whittaker, John Macnaughten (wrong name form) |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | British mathematician |
| DATE OF BIRTH | March 7, 1905 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Cambridge |
| DATE OF DEATH | January 29, 1984 |
| Place of death | Sheffield |