Roland Sprague

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Roland Percival Sprague (born July 11, 1894 in Unterliederbach , † August 1, 1967 ) was a German mathematician .

Life

Sprague was the grandson of the mathematicians Hermann Amandus Schwarz and Thomas Bond Sprague, great-grandson of Ernst Eduard Kummer and great-great-grandson of Nathan Mendelssohn .

After graduating from high school in 1912 at Bismarck-Gymnasium in Berlin-Wilmersdorf , Sprague studied from 1912 to 1919 in Berlin and Göttingen , interrupted by military service between 1915 and 1918. In 1921, he passed the state examination for teaching in mathematics, chemistry and physics in Berlin . From 1922 he worked as a study assistant at the Paulsen-Realgymnasium in Berlin-Steglitz , from 1924 at the Schiller-Gymnasium (at times Clausewitz-Schule ) in Berlin-Charlottenburg , where he became a teacher in 1925.

In 1950, Sprague did his doctorate under Alexander Dinghas at the Free University of Berlin with a dissertation on the subject of the unambiguous determinability of the elements of a finite set through twofold division . Sprague, appointed senior student councilor in 1953 , was appointed professor at the Berlin University of Education in 1955 , where he had been a lecturer since 1949.

Sprague is known for his contributions to entertainment mathematics as well as Sprague-Grundy's theorem , which Sprague published in 1935 and Patrick Michael Grundy independently of it in 1940. With this sentence, Sprague completed specific approaches by Emanuel Lasker , which make winning strategies easy to calculate for generalized Nim games .

Fonts

  • About mathematical fighting games , Tôhoku Mathematical Journal, Volume 41 (1935), pp. 438-444 ( online version ).
  • About two varieties of Nim , Tôhoku Mathematical Journal, Volume 43 (1937), pp. 451-454 ( online version ).
  • Entertaining mathematics: new problems, surprising solutions , 2nd edition, 1969, doi : 10.1007 / 978-3-322-98598-9 .

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Personal form , Parcival according to Personal Card 1 (archive database of the library for research on the history of education )
  2. ↑ see en: Thomas Bond Sprague
  3. ↑ a b c Meeting reports of the Berlin Mathematical Society, 2001, p. 333.
  4. ^ Documents on Roland Sprague in the archive database of the library for research on the history of education
  5. ↑ Roland Sprague in the Mathematics Genealogy Project (English)Template: MathGenealogyProject / Maintenance / name used
  6. ↑ About math fighting games
  7. ^ PM Grundy: Mathematics and games , Eureka. 27 (1940), pp. 9-11 ( online version ( Memento of September 27, 2007 in the Internet Archive )).
  8. ↑ Jörg Bewersdorff : Luck, Logic and Bluff: Mathematics in Play - Methods, Results and Limits , Springer-Spektrum Verlag, 6th edition 2012, ISBN 978-3-8348-1923-9 , doi: 10.1007 / 978-3-8348 -2319-9 , pp. 120-126.
personal data
SURNAME Sprague, Roland
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Sprague, Roland Parcival
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German mathematician
DATE OF BIRTH July 11, 1894
PLACE OF BIRTH Unterliederbach
DATE OF DEATH August 1, 1967