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DEATHS Contents
Atle Selberg ATLE SELBERG Atle Selberg, who was elected an Honorary Member of the London Mathematical Society in 1985, died on 6 August 2007, aged 90. M.N. Huxley writes: Research students in the 1960s were assured by Conway that anyone who proved the Prime Number Theorem would live forever. The death of Atle Selberg was the fourth and last falsifying example. He was born in Langesund on the South coast of Norway on 14 June 1917. The youngest of three mathematical brothers in a large family, he was inspired by the beauty of formulae and the story of Ramanujan. He went up to the University of Oslo in 1935 and won his PhD there in 1943, having already been appointed a research fellow. He made many of his discoveries and rediscoveries working in isolation during the war years. In 1947 Selberg and his wife Hedvig visited the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton. By 1949 he was a permanent member, and became a Fields Medallist in 1950. Selberg's interests centred on automorphic functions, prime numbers, the Riemann zeta function, and related areas in analysis and algebraic groups. He saw the Riemann Hypothesis as a question for a general class of functions, and he evidently believed, with Riemann, that it connected with the real eigenvalues of some self-adjoint operator. His favourite methods were inner products and duality, and to mollify the property of being a prime number. He rediscovered the Peterson inner product for modular forms, and interpreted the Rankin series as a convolution. These ideas led to the Trace Formula, linking the metric geometry of an orbifold with the spectrum of its Laplacian. His mollifiers were coefficients on the integers, often constructed by inner products, which emphasised the prime numbers. They were used in his Sieve, and to show that a positive proportion of the zeros of the zeta function agreed with the Riemann Hypothesis, quantifying Riemann's sehr wahrscheinlich. Sensationally, his mollification led to a real-analytic proof of the Prime Number Theorem, hitherto accessible to complex methods alone. As Selberg was working on the Prime Number Theorem, it seems that an unguarded conversation led to Erdös completing the argument first. Selberg's reaction was a disaster. After that he published nothing till it was complete with nothing more to say. Later he relented enough to give glimpses of his work in conference lectures. But he renounced the stimulus of discussing ideas, and his discoveries and insights were slow to influence the mathematical community. Selberg sometimes discouraged young mathematicians by saying 'I knew that,' but he inspired great loyalty in his friends. Three mathematicians joined the family vigil as he lay dying. He leaves a widow, two children, and four grandchildren. DAVID EMERY David John Emery, who was elected a member of the London Mathematical Society on 18 June 1970, died on 2 August 2007, aged 62. David Emery was a pupil of Harry (Professor G.E.H.) Reuter at Imperial College; his PhD, of 1974, was on probability theory. His special interest was fluctuation theory of random walks and Lévy processes, particularly use of complex-variable (Wiener-Hopf) methods. Both his thesis and the papers that came out of it were recognized as excellent, and have been influential. David spent his career at the Polytechnic of Central London, which became the University of Westminster in 1992. RICHARD LEWIS Richard P. Lewis, who was elected a member of the London Mathematical Society on 20 May 1977, died on 26 July 2007, aged 65. Following his first class degree at Queen's College, Oxford, in 1963, he studied algebraic topology under the supervision of Sir Michael Atiyah and joined the staff of the University of Sussex in October 1966. James Hirschfeld writes: He was a talented mathematician and a willing colleague. He enjoyed all aspects of mathematics and communicated this to the students in the many different courses that he taught. He was a popular supervisor for student essays on mathematical games, and played the game Go to a respectable standard. During the 1980s, he switched his research interests to number theory, and completed a Sussex DPhil in 1991. His published output was distinguished by its elegance, even amongst the generality of papers in that field, where such a quality is often noted. His last paper 'The generating functions of the rank and crank modulo 8' will appear in a forthcoming issue of the Ramanujan Journal. He retired from Sussex University in 2003, but was tutoring the Open University MSc right up to the end, as well as continuing with his own research. COLIN TRIPP Colin Tripp, who was elected a member of the London Mathematical Society on 19 November 1999, died on 14 March 2007, aged 69. Tony Rawlins writes: Colin was a much admired and respected academic in the Department of Mathematics at Brunel from September 1966 until his retirement in 2002. He was generally regarded as one of the kindest, cleverest, but also one of the most modest people you could wish to meet. Colin was a problem solver par excellence. He had a very lucid style of lecturing that incorporated this problem-solving approach. He took endless pains to help even the weakest students to try to understand what he was teaching. He felt he had a mission in life to convey the beauty of mathematics to everyone he encountered. This was a subject he understood so well and loved so much. Many students and colleagues will be sad to hear of his death at a time when he was still so active. He will live on in the thoughts and memories of all those people he helped, in his lifetime.
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