Harold Davenport (or Davenport , Eng. Harold Davenport , 1907-1969) - English mathematician , student of Littlewood . He made a significant contribution to number theory , especially to the analytical theory of Diophantine equations and algebraic number theory [3] .
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Member of the Royal Society of London (since 1940), laureate of the Sylvester Medal (1967, " in recognition of his extensive outstanding contribution to number theory "). President of the London Mathematical Society in 1957-1959 [4] , laureate of (1954) [5] .
Biography and scientific activities
Born in 1907 in the English village of Hankout near Accrington , Lancashire in a poor family, his parents worked at a local mill. After successfully graduating from high school (1924), Davenport received two scholarships that allowed the gifted young man to enter the University of Manchester , where Luis Mordell and Arthur Milne taught [5] .
In 1927, Davenport graduated with highest honors and, on Milne's advice, enrolled at Trinity College Cambridge , where he attended lectures by A. S. Bezikovich , Ralph Fowler, and John Littlewood, a prominent English number theory specialist. The latter became his supervisor. Among the student friends of Davenport was Harold Coxeter [5] .
Davenport's first papers dealt with the problem of the distribution of quadratic residues . In 1932-1933, Davenport visited German colleagues in Marburg and Göttingen , in particular, recognized expert algebraist Helmut Hasse, to discuss this topic. Hasse had previously asked Mordell to send him a young English mathematician to learn English; at the same time, Davenport became fluent in German. Another result of their joint work was for Gauss sums . Davenport contributed to Waring’s problem - he proved that each sufficiently large number is a sum of no more than sixteen fourth degrees [5] .
Returning to the UK, at the invitation of Mordell, Davenport got a chair at his native University of Manchester (1937), where he took up two topics that were problematic at that time - diophantine approximations and number geometry . Davenport made a significant contribution to other topics - the estimation of trigonometric sums and characters in finite fields [6] . His works had a special influence on modern algebraic number theory .
He was later a professor at the University of Wales (1941), University College London (1945), Stanford University ( California , 1947-1948). Since 1958 he was back in Cambridge and remained there until his death (1969) from lung cancer. A heavy smoker, he tried several times to quit smoking, but could not do it [5] .
Davenport was married to Anne Lofthouse, whom she met at University College of North Wales in 1944 (she worked at the "Department of Modern Languages"). They had two sons, Richard and James [5] .
In 1950, Davenport was a guest speaker at the International Congress of Mathematicians ( Cambridge ), and at the 1966 Congress was a member of the Fields Medal Award Committee [7] .
Memory
The name of the scientist is a number of mathematical concepts and theorems, including:
- Davenport-Sinzel sequence .
- .
- .
- .
- Cauchy-Davenport Theorem .
Books
Davenport is the author of about 200 books and articles. His main books are still reprinted and translated into many languages of the world.
- The Higher Arithmetic: An Introduction to the Theory of Numbers (1952) [8] .
- Analytic methods for Diophantine equations and Diophantine inequalities (1962)
- Multiplicative number theory (1967) [9]
Posthumous four-volume collection of selected works of Davenport:
- The collected works of Harold Davenport (1977) in four volumes, edited by BJ Birch, H. Halberstam, CA Rogers [10]
Russian translations
- Davenport G. Higher Arithmetic. Introduction to number theory. M .: Nauka, 1965.176 s.
- Reprint: Introduction to Number Theory. University Book, 2008, ISBN: 978-5-9502-0243-8.
- Davenport G. Multiplicative Number Theory. M .: Nauka, 1971.190 s.
Notes
- ↑ 1 2 SNAC - 2010.
- ↑ Mathematical Genealogy - 1997.
- ↑ Biographical Dictionary, 1979 .
- ↑ PR Cooper Presidents of the London Mathematical Society . Date of treatment February 22, 2007. Archived on October 6, 2007.
- ↑ 1 2 3 4 5 6 MacTutor .
- ↑ Davenport H. On character sums in finite fields. Acta Math em., 71, 99-121, 1939.
- ↑ Fields Medals
- ↑ Bateman, PT; Bateman, PT Review: The higher arithmentic , by H. Davenport (Eng.) // Bull. Amer. Math. Soc. : journal. - 1953. - Vol. 59 , no. 5 . - P. 473—474 . - DOI : 10.1090 / S0002-9904-1953-09724-5 .
- ↑ Stark, HM; Stark, HM Review: Introduction to analytic number theory , by K. Chandrasekharan; Arithmetical functions , by K. Chandrasekharan; Multiplicative number theory , by Harold Davenport; Sequences , by H. Halberstam and KF Roth (English) // Bull. Amer. Math. Soc. : journal. - 1971. - Vol. 77 , no. 6 . - P. 943-957 . - DOI : 10.1090 / S0002-9904-1971-12812-4 .
- ↑ Grosswald, Emil; Grosswald, Emil. Review: BJ Birch, H. Halberstam, and CA Rogers, The collected works of Harold Davenport (Eng.) // Bull. Amer. Math. Soc. (NS) : journal. - 1979. - Vol. 1 , no. 4 . - P. 668-675 . - DOI : 10.1090 / s0273-0979-1979-14657-3 .
Literature
- Borodin A.I., Bugay A.S. Davenport (Davenport), Harold (Harold) // Biographical Dictionary of Figures in the Field of Mathematics. - Kiev: Radyanska school, 1979.- S. 169. - 607 p.
Links
- John J. O'Connor and Edmund F. Robertson . Davenport, Harold (eng.) - biography in the MacTutor archive.