Robert Alexander Rankin

Robert Alexander Rankin (born October 27, 1915 in Garlieston in Wigtownshire in Scotland , † January 27, 2001 in Glasgow ) was a British mathematician, known for his work on modular forms .

Rankin was the son of Rev Oliver Shaw Rankin, who became a professor of theology and literature in Edinburgh in 1937. He studied at Clare College of Cambridge University with John Edensor Littlewood and Albert Ingham . He graduated in 1937 and was made a Fellow in 1939. In 1939 he received the Rayleigh Prize for his work on the spacing of consecutive prime numbers . During World War II he worked on the theoretical ballistics of missiles at Fort Halstead and Wales - he published the results, which the British government did not give a high priority, in a long article in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society after the war . After the war he was back in Cambridge, where he became a lecturer in 1948. In 1951 he became a Mason Professor at the University of Birmingham and in 1954 Professor at the University of Glasgow , where he retired in 1982.

Rankin dealt with analytical number theory and modular forms. In 1939 he developed the Rankin-Selberg method in the theory of modular forms (it expresses the associated functions as an integral over Eisenstein series), which is named after him and Atle Selberg . She plays a role in the Langlands program . He was also heavily inspired by S. Ramanujan's manuscripts, whose unsolved problems he worked briefly on in 1939 under Hardy, with whom Ramanujan had originally worked twenty years earlier. In 1995 he published Ramanujan's letters with Bruce Berndt . ${\displaystyle L}$

In 1955 he became a member of the Royal Society of Edinburgh . In 1987 he received the Senior Whitehead Prize of the London Mathematical Society and in 1998 the De Morgan Medal .

He had been married since 1942 and had two children. Rankin was also an accomplished organ player and had a keen interest in the Scottish Celtic language, Gaelic (in 1957 he was President of the Glasgow Gaelic Society).

Fonts

• The modular group and its subgroup , Madras, Ramanujan Institute, 1969.
• Modular forms and functions , Cambridge University Press 1977.
• An introduction to mathematical analysis , Dover 2007

literature

• Bruce Berndt, Ken Ono (Editor): Number theory and modular forms. Papers in memory of Robert Rankin , Kluwer 2003

Web links

• John J. O'Connor, Edmund F. Robertson :  Robert Alexander Rankin. In: MacTutor History of Mathematics archive .