Die Habilitation von John von Neumann an der Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität in Berlin: Urteile über einen ungarisch-jüdischen Mathematiker in Deutschland im Jahr 1927

The mathematician John von Neumann was born in Hungary but principally received his scientific education and socialization in the German science system. He received his Habilitation from the Friedrich-Wilhelms–Universität in Berlin in 1927, where he lectured as a Privatdozent until his emigration to the USA. This article aims at making a contribution to this early part of Neumann’s scientific biography by analyzing in detail the procedure that led to his Habilitation as well as the beginnings of Neumann’s research on functional analysis. An analysis of the relevant sources shows that in Berlin in the year 1927 Neumann was not yet regarded as the outstanding mathematical genius of the 20th century. Furthermore it will be seen that Neumann had great difficulties in developing the fundamental concepts for his path breaking work in spectral theory and only managed to do so with the support of the Berlin mathematician Erhard Schmidt.     

John Reynolds of the Mint: A mathematician in the service of king and commonwealth

In his youth, John Reynolds showed a talent for arithmetic and was destined for a career as a mathematician at the Tower Mint in London. He became skilled in the algorithms needed to determine the correct relationship between the weight and purity of coins and their values. This was a matter of national importance, and his work came to the attention of King James I, who reigned from 1603 to 1625, and his chief ministers, including Robert Cecil and Francis Bacon. It seemed that John might attain high office himself, but the murky administration of the early Stuart period cast its shadow over his career. Nevertheless, for the next forty years he continued to play a major part in the nation's affairs. He produced books of tables for the valuation of coins in the commercial world, and for the highly technical work of the assayers. Also, he was actively involved in the production of standard measures and instruments used by the excise officers. His life and works illustrate how mathematical ideas were employed by the English government in the period of the early Stuart kings and the Commonwealth.     

Pure mathematics applied in early twentieth-century America: The case of T.H. Gronwall,consulting mathematician

Thomas Hakon Gronwall (1877–1932) was a Swedish-American mathematician with a broad range of interests in mathematical analysis, physics, and engineering. Though he was primarly known for his results in pure mathematics, his career as a “consulting mathematician” in America from 1912 to his death in 1932 provides a backdrop against which one can discuss contemporary issues involved in the increasing application of mathematics to engineering, industrial, and scientific problems. This paper attempts a summary of his major mathematical contributions to industrial, governmental, and academic institutions while relating his often difficult life during these years.     

Beyond mathematical content knowledge: A mathematician's knowledge needed for teaching an inquiry-oriented differential equations course

In this research report we examine knowledge other than content knowledge needed by a mathematician in his first use of an inquiry-oriented curriculum for teaching an undergraduate course in differential equations. Collaboratively, the mathematician and two mathematics education researchers identified the challenges faced by the mathematician as he began to adopt reform-minded teaching practices. Our analysis reveals that responding to those challenges entailed formulating and addressing particular instructional goals, previously unfamiliar to the instructor. From a cognitive analytical perspective, we argue that the instructor's knowledge — or lack of knowledge — influenced his ability to set and accomplish his instructional goals as he planned for, reflected on, and enacted instruction. By studying the teaching practices of a professional mathematician, we identify forms of knowledge apart from mathematical content knowledge that are essential to reform-oriented teaching, and we highlight how knowledge acquired through more traditional instructional practices may fail to support research-based forms of student-centered teaching.     

In memoriam Israel Gohberg August 23, 1928-October 12, 2009

This obituary for Israel Gohberg consists of a general introduction, separate contributions of the six authors, all of whom worked closely with him, and a final note. The material gives an impression of the life of this great mathematician, of his monumental impact in the areas he worked in, of how he cooperated with colleagues, and of his ability to stimulate people in their mathematical activities.     

George David Birkhoff and John von Neumann: A Question of Priority and the Ergodic Theorems, 1931–1932

Based on a recently discovered letter of John von Neumann to his friend Howard Percy Robertson, the present paper discusses in detail the priority of the discovery and publication of the ergodic theorems by George David Birkhoff and von Neumann in 1931/1932. © 2002 Elsevier Science (USA).À la suite de la découverte récente d'une lettre de John von Neumann à son ami Howard Percy Robertson, cet article examine en détail les priorités de George David Birkhoff et von Neumann dans la découverte et la publication des théorèmes ergodiques, dans les années 1931/1932. © 2002 Elsevier Science (USA).MSC subject classifications: 01A60, 01A70.     

Accommodation in the formal world of mathematical thinking

ABSTRACT

In this study, we examined a mathematician and one of his students’ teaching journals and thought processes concurrently as the class was moving towards the proof of the Fundamental Theorem of Galois Theory. We employed Tall's framework of three worlds of mathematical thinking as well as Piaget's notion of accommodation to theoretically study the narratives. This paper reveals the pedagogical challenges of proving an elegant theory as the events unfolded. Although the mathematician was conscious of the students’ abilities as he carefully made the path accessible, the disparity between the mind of the mathematician and the student became apparent.     

A robust von Neumann minimax theorem for zero-sum games under bounded payoff uncertainty

The celebrated von Neumann minimax theorem is a fundamental theorem in two-person zero-sum games. In this paper, we present a generalization of the von Neumann minimax theorem, called robust von Neumann minimax theorem, in the face of data uncertainty in the payoff matrix via robust optimization approach. We establish that the robust von Neumann minimax theorem is guaranteed for various classes of bounded uncertainties, including the matrix 1-norm uncertainty, the rank-1 uncertainty and the columnwise affine parameter uncertainty.     

Francesco Carlini: Kepler's equation and the asymptotic solution to singular differential equations

Carlini's career was mainly dedicated to astronomy, but he was also a particularly skilled mathematician. In this article we collect and analyse his mathematical contributions in detail. In particular, in his important Memoir of the year 1817 devoted to Kepler's equation he introduced an innovative idea to solve ordinary differential equations with singular perturbations by means of asymptotic expansions. In the same Memoir also appeared, five years before Laplace's contributions, what is usually called the Laplace limit constant. Furthermore, Carlini published other mathematical Memoirs anticipating, 70 years in advance, the importance of complex branches of the Lambert's special function.     

Mathematical recreations of Dénes König and his work on graph theory

Dénes König (1884–1944) is a Hungarian mathematician well known for his treatise on graph theory (König, 1936). When he was a student, he published two books on mathematical recreations ( and ). Does his work on mathematical recreations have any relation to his work on graph theory? If yes, how are they connected? To answer these questions, we will examine his books of 1902, 1905 and 1936, and compare them with each other. We will see that the books of 1905 and 1936 include many common topics, and that the treatment of these topics is different between 1905 and 1936.     

Sets versus trial sequences,Hausdorff versus von Mises: “Pure” mathematics prevails in the foundations of probability around 1920

The paper discusses the tension which occurred between the notions of set (with measure) and (trial-) sequence (or—to a certain degree—between nondenumerable and denumerable sets) when used in the foundations of probability theory around 1920. The main mathematical point was the logical need for measures in order to describe general nondiscrete distributions, which had been tentatively introduced before (1919) based on von Mises’s notion of the “Kollektiv.” In the background there was a tension between the standpoints of pure mathematics and “real world probability” (in the words of J.L. Doob) at the time. The discussion and publication in English translation (in Appendix) of two critical letters of November 1919 by the “pure” mathematician Felix Hausdorff to the engineer and applied mathematician Richard von Mises compose about one third of the paper. The article also investigates von Mises’s ill-conceived effort to adopt measures and his misinterpretation of an influential book of Constantin Carathéodory. A short and sketchy look at the subsequent development of the standpoints of the pure and the applied mathematician—here represented by Hausdorff and von Mises—in the probability theory of the 1920s and 1930s concludes the paper.     

Preface

<正>Professor Roger Temam is a world renowned applied mathematician. His first major contribution to science is his thesis (these d'etat) worked under the direction of the late Professor Jacque-Louis Lions on fractional step methods and their application to the incompressible Navier-Stokes equations (independently studied by Alexander Chorin).     

Richard von Mises and the “problem of two races”: A statistical satire in 1934

The article “Problem of two races,” which appeared in 1934 in French and Russian in the Matematichesky Sbornik (Moscow), authored by the noted applied mathematician and statistician Richard von Mises (1883–1953), is interpreted as having a twofold agenda. On its surface it is merely a detailed mathematical analysis of the statistical problem of comparing the distributions of a quantitative characteristic in two different classes. But on closer examination it serves two auxiliary purposes. On the one hand, von Mises, who as a Jew fled Nazi Germany in 1933, satirically attacked Nazi racial doctrines by resorting to statistical parody. On the other hand, von Mises employed his theoretical results to further his own distinctive program of objective Bayesian statistics.     

Multiplicity results of p(x)-Laplacian systems with Neumann conditions

In this paper, we study a Neumann problem for elliptic systems with variable exponents. We obtain the existence of at least three nontrivial solutions by using an equivalent variational approach to a recent Ricceri’s three critical points theorem (Ricceri in Nonlinear Anal TMA 70:3084–3089, 2009).     

Peirce's place in mathematics

This article compares treatments of the infinite, of continuity and definitions of real numbers produced by the German mathematician Georg Cantor and Richard Dedekind in the late 19th century with similar interests developed at virtually the same time by the American mathematician/philosopher C. S. Peirce. Peirce was led, not by the internal concerns of mathematics which had motivated Cantor and Dedekind, but by research he undertook in logic, to investigate orders of infinite sets (multitudes, in his terminology), and to introduce the related concept of infinitesimals. His arguments in support of the mathematical and logical validity of infinitesimals (which were rejected by such eminent mathematicians as Cantor, Peano, and Russell at the turn of the century) are considered. Attention is also given to the connections between Peirce's mathematics, his philosophy, and especially his interest in continuity as it was related to his Pragmatism.     

The KKM principle in abstract convex spaces: Equivalent formulations and applications

The partial KKM principle for an abstract convex space is an abstract form of the classical KKM theorem. A KKM space is an abstract convex space satisfying the partial KKM principle and its “open” version. In this paper, we clearly derive a sequence of a dozen statements which characterize the KKM spaces and equivalent formulations of the partial KKM principle. As their applications, we add more than a dozen statements including generalized formulations of von Neumann minimax theorem, von Neumann intersection lemma, the Nash equilibrium theorem, and the Fan type minimax inequalities for any KKM spaces. Consequently, this paper unifies and enlarges previously known several proper examples of such statements for particular types of KKM spaces.     

Ky Fan (1914�C2010), he spent every waking moment thinking about mathematics

This survey article on Dr. Ky Fan summarizes his versatile achievements and fundamental contributions in the fields of topological groups, nonlinear and convex analysis, operator theory, linear algebra and matrix theory, mathematical programming, and approximation theory, etc., and as well reveals Fan’s exemplary mathematical formation opening up the beauty of pure mathematics, with natural conditions, concise statements and elegant proofs. This article contains a brief biography of Dr. Fan and epitomizes his life. He was not only a great mathematician, but also a very serious teacher known to be extremely strict to his students. He loved his motherland and made generous donations for promoting mathematical development in China. He devoted his life to mathematics, continued his research and published papers till 85 years old.     

Ergodic theorems for noncommutative dynamical systems

Recently, E.C. Lance extended the pointwise ergodic theorem to actions of the group of integers on von Neumann algebras. Our purpose is to extend other pointwise ergodic theorems to von Neumann algebra context: the Dunford-Schwartz-Zygmund pointwise ergodic theorem, the pointwise ergodic theorem for connected amenable locally compact groups, the Wiener's local ergodic theorem for ₊ ^d and for general Lie groups.     

Remarks on acyclic versions of generalized von Neumann and Nash equilibrium theorems

A fixed-point theorem on compact compositions of acyclic maps on admissible (in the sense of Klee) convex subset of a t.v.s. is applied to obtain a cyclic coincidence theorem for acyclic maps, generalized von Neumann type intersection theorems, the Nash type equilibrium theorems, and the von Neumann minimax theorem. Our new results generalize earlier works of Lassonde [1], Simons [2], and Park [3,4].     

Sarason’s interpolation theorem for analytic crossed products

Saito (Math. Proc. Camb. Phil. Soc., 117, 11–20, 1995) proved Sarason’s interpolation theorem for an analytic crossed product determined by a finite von Neumann algebra. We extend this result without the assumption that the von Neumann algebra is finite.