William Fogg Osgood

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William Fogg Osgood (1864-1943) was an American mathematician, born in Boston.

In 1886 he graduated from Harvard, where, after studying at the universities of Göttingen (1887-'89) and Erlangen (Ph.D., 1890), he was instructor (1890-'93), assistant professor (1893-1903), and thenceforth professor of mathematics. He became professor emeritus in 1933. Osgood was chairman of the department of mathematics in Harvard from 1918 to 1922.

From 1899 to 1902 he served as editor of the Annals of Mathematics and in 1904-'05 was president of the American Mathematical Society, whose Transactions he edited in 1909-'10. In 1904 he was elected to the National Academy of Sciences.

The works of Osgood dealt with complex analysis, in particular conformal mapping and uniformization of analytic functions, and calculus of variations. He was invited by Felix Klein to write an article on complex analysis in the Enciclopaedie der Mathematischen Wissenschaften which was later expanded in the book Lehrbuch der Funktionentheorie. Besides his research on analysis, Osgood was also interested in mathematical physics and wrote on the theory of the gyroscope.

[edit] Works by W. F. Osgood

Osgood's books include:

• Introduction to Infinite Series (Harvard University Press 1897; third edition, 1906)
• (with W. C. Graustein) Plane and solid analytic geometry (Macmillan, NY, 1921)
• Lehrbuch der Funktionentheorie (Teubner, Berlin, 1907; second edition, 1912)
• First Course in Differential and Integral Calculus (1907; revised edition, 1909)
• Elementary calculus (MacMillan, NY, 1921)
• Mechanics (MacMillan, NY, 1937)

[edit] Bibliography

• Bernard Osgood Koopman

William Fogg Osgood—In memoriam Bull. Amer. Math. Soc. 50, 139-142 (1944).

• William Fogg Osgood by Joseph L. Walsh.

This article incorporates text from an edition of the New International Encyclopedia that is in the public domain.