Lionel Cooper

Jacob Lionel Bakst Cooper, ca.1960

Jacob Lionel Bakst Cooper (born December 27, 1915 in Beaufort West , Cape Province, South Africa , † August 8, 1979 in London ) was a British mathematician who dealt with analysis .

Cooper, whose parents had a farm, went to school in Cape Town and began to study mathematics and physics there in 1932, where he won several prizes and was also active in the socialist student community. Since there were many Jewish refugees from Germany in Cape Town at that time, he also learned fluent German. From 1935 he studied with a Rhodes scholarship at Queens College, Oxford University . In 1940 he received his doctorate under Edward Charles Titchmarsh (Theory and application of Fourier integrals). During the Second World War he worked in an aircraft factory because he was unfit for military service due to impaired vision. After the war he was a lecturer at Birkbeck College and Imperial College in London and from 1951 professor at the University of Cardiff . In 1954 he was visiting professor at the Witwatersrand University , 1964/65 he was visiting professor at Caltech and from 1965 to 1967 at the University of Toronto . In 1967 he became head of the mathematics faculty at Chelsea College, University of London. He died as a result of heart surgery.

Cooper worked on many areas of analysis, for example the theory of unbounded operators in Hilbert spaces and integral transformations. He also published on applications in mathematical physics, such as quantum mechanics, heat conduction, and elasticity theory. He corresponded with Albert Einstein in 1949 about the Einstein-Rosen-Podolsky paradox , about which he published in 1950.

In 1949 he received the Junior Berwick Prize .

Web links

• John J. O'Connor, Edmund F. Robertson :  Lionel Cooper. In: MacTutor History of Mathematics archive .

Individual evidence

1. ^ Date of death according to David Edmunds , obituary in Bulletin of the London Mathematical Society , Vol. 13 (1981), pp. 429-450.