Oene Bottema

Oene Bottema (born December 25, 1901 in Groningen , † 1992 ) was a Dutch mathematician who dealt with geometry, especially kinematics .

Life

Bottema went to the higher middle school in Groningen and studied mathematics and physics at the University of Groningen until 1924. Afterwards he was a teacher at the high school in Groningen and other cities, where he also taught as a private lecturer at the University of Groningen from 1931 to 1935 and in Leiden from 1937 to 1940. From 1933 to 1935 he headed the high school in Sappema . In 1927 he received his doctorate with Willem van der Woude at the TH Delft (Figuur van four cruising right lijnen). The dissertation was about the projective properties of a figure made up of four straight lines at an angle to each other (so-called Voss quadruples). During his time as a teacher, he published an average of one mathematical work per year and he published one book. From 1935 to 1941 he was director of the Higher Civic School in Deventer and from 1941 professor at the Technical University of Delft . 1951 to 1959 he was rector of the university. Then he turned back to research (geometry, kinematics).

In 1961 he met Ferdinand Freudenstein on a visit to the USA and began working with him and Freudenstein's pupil Bernard Roth , where Bottema brought in his encyclopedic knowledge of geometry, which he was able to apply there in many ways. He continued his scientific work until a few years before his death. In addition to his career in mathematics, he also had one as a university and school manager. He was educated in many ways and called a collection of his lectures Steen en Schelp (stone and bowl) after a passage from The Prelude by the English poet William Wordsworth (stone symbolized geometry and the bowl symbolized poetry).

At a time when mathematics was moving in an abstract direction, Bottema was interested in classical geometry, which then became increasingly important for the kinematics of machines in the 1960s. In 1928 he published an essay on the introduction of coordinates in projective geometry. In his book on plane geometry, he set up an equation that gives necessary and sufficient conditions for the base points of triangles. In kinematics he is known for introducing the method of instantaneous invariants. A description of the movement of a moving reference system in relation to a stationary reference system is determined by the choice of parameters in such a way that as many coefficients as possible of the Taylor expansion vanish and the remaining invariants are the Euclidean movement group.

Hans Lauwerier is one of his doctoral students .

In 1930 he married Femmy Berendsen (died 1981), with whom he had a son and a daughter.

Fonts

• De elementaire meetkunde van het platte vlak , Groningen, Noordhoff 1938
• with Bernard Roth: Theoretical Kinematics , North Holland 1979

literature

• Toen Koetsier: Oene Bottema (1901-1992) , in: Distinguished Figures in Mechanics and Machine Science. History of Mechanics and Machine Science, Volume 1, 2007, pp. 61-78

See also

• Stewart's Theorem

Web links

• Author profile in the database zbMATH

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Oene Bottema in the Mathematics Genealogy Project (English)
2. ↑ Bottema, Het invoeren van coördinaten in de projectieve meetkunde, Kgl.Akad.van Wet., Amsterdam 1928, Volume 37, No. 7, pp. 1-10