Oliver Kellogg

Oliver Dimon Kellogg (born July 10, 1878 in Linwood , Pennsylvania , † July 26, 1932 in Greenville , Maine ) was an American mathematician.

His father Day Otis Kellogg was a professor of literature at the University of Kansas and editor of the American edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica . Kellogg studied from 1895 at Princeton University , where he completed his master’s degree in 1900 and first went to the Humboldt University in Berlin with a Kennedy scholarship and then to the Georg-August University in Göttingen in 1901/02 . Kellogg received his doctorate there in 1902 under David Hilbert ( on the theory of integral equations and Dirichlet's principle ). He was then an instructor at Princeton and from 1905 at the University of Missouriwhere he became a professor in 1910. He married in 1911. During World War I he was a scientific advisor at the US Coast Guard Academy in New London, Connecticut, where he worked on the discovery of submarines. In 1919 he became a lecturer at Harvard University , an associate professor in 1920 and a professor in 1927. In 1921 he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences . He died of a heart attack while climbing.

Kellogg is known for his work on potential theory , which he has dealt with since his dissertation and on which he wrote the classic textbook Foundations of Potential Theory in 1929 . In 1922 he generalized Brouwer's fixed point theorem with George David Birkhoff to the Birkhoff-Kellogg theorem.

Arthur Copeland is one of his students.

Fonts

• Foundations of Potential Theory. Basic teachings of the mathematical sciences, Springer-Verlag 1967.

Web links

• Literature by and about Oliver Kellogg in the catalog of the German National Library
• John J. O'Connor, Edmund F. Robertson :  Oliver Kellogg. In: MacTutor History of Mathematics archive .