Nathan Altshiller-Court

Nathan Altshiller Court (born January 22, 1881 in Warsaw , † July 20, 1968 in Norman , Oklahoma ), later Nathan Altshiller Court , was a Polish- born American mathematician and university professor .

Life and career

Little is known about the first years of Altshiller-Court's life. He studied in Belgium at the University of Ghent , where he obtained his doctorate in 1911 . He then went to the United States and in 1917 became Assistant Professor of Mathematics at the University of Oklahoma . In 1919 he took on the US citizenship and from then on bore the surname Court , keeping the Altshiller as the middle part of his name. It was in 1935 Full Professor at the University of Oklahoma and went in 1951 into the retirement .

Scientific achievements and writings

Nathan Altshiller-Court dealt almost exclusively with geometry and worked in particular on triangular and circular geometry as well as in spatial geometry on the geometry of the tetrahedron . He is the author or co-author of more than 70 scientific papers . He is also the author of two widely read geometrical standard works :

• Nathan Altshiller-Court: Modern Pure Solid Geometry . 2nd Edition. Chelsea Publishing Company , New York 1964, OCLC 1597161 ( MR0172153 ).
• Nathan Altshiller-Court: College Geometry . An introduction to the modern geometry of the triangle and the circle. Reprint of the second (1980) edition. 3. Edition. Dover Publications, Inc. , Mineola , NY 2007, ISBN 978-0-486-45805-2 ( MR2351498 ).

In addition, he published - together with other authors - many smaller notes on mathematical, especially geometric, problems and their solutions.

In addition, he wrote a math book intended for the general public:

• Nathan Altshiller-Court: Mathematics in Fun and in Earnest . New American Library , New York 1958.

Web links

• Short biography (including list of publications)