Harry Vandiver

Harry Vandiver
Born (1882-10-21)21 October 1882
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
Died 9 January 1973(1973-01-09) (aged 90)
Austin, Texas
Nationality United States
Fields Mathematics
Institutions University of Texas
Alma mater none
Doctoral students Ferdinand Biesele
Milo Weaver
Richard Kelisky
Notable awards Cole Prize (1931)

Harry Schultz Vandiver (October 21, 1882 – January 9, 1973) was an American mathematician, known for work in number theory.

He was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania to John Lyon and Ida Frances (Everett) Vandiver. He did not complete a formal education, choosing instead to leave school at an early age to work for his father's firm, although he did attend some graduate classes at the University of Pennsylvania in 1904–5.

From 1917 to 1919 he was a member of the United States Naval Reserve, and in 1919 became an instructor of mathematics at Cornell University, where he taught for five years before becoming an associate professor of pure mathematics at the University of Texas in 1924. He was made a full professor the following year, and named distinguished professor of applied mathematics and astronomy in 1947. He remained at Texas until his retirement in 1966.

Vandiver won the Frank Nelson Cole Prize of the American Mathematical Society for his paper on Fermat's Last Theorem in 1931. In 1952 he used a computer to study it, proving the result for all primes less than 2000.[1]

A question he frequently asked about the class group of cyclotomic fields, and now known as Kummer–Vandiver conjecture, was first posed in an 1849 letter from Ernst Kummer to Leopold Kronecker.

For the academic year 1927–1928 Vandiver received a Guggenheim Fellowship.[2] In 1934 he was elected to the National Academy of Sciences.[3] In 1945, the University of Pennsylvania awarded him with an honorary doctoral degree.[4]

References

  1. ↑ Lehmer, D. H.; Lehmer, Emma; Vandiver, H. S. (1954), "An Application of High-Speed Computing to Fermat's Last Theorem", PNAS, 40 (1): 25–33, PMC 527932 Freely accessible, PMID 16589420, doi:10.1073/pnas.40.1.25.
  2. ↑ Harry Vandiver, Guggenheim Foundation
  3. ↑ The National Academy of Sciences: The First Hundred Years, 1863–1963
  4. ↑ Penn: Office of the University Secretary: Alphabetical Listing of Honorary Degrees
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