Brian H. Murdoch

Brian H. Murdoch (born 1930) is an Irish mathematician who served for 33 years as Erasmus Smith's Professor of Mathematics at Trinity College Dublin (TCD). He is an analyst with expertise in potential functions and random walks.

Career

Brian Hughes Murdoch was born in 1930 in Dublin, and obtained a BA in mathematics in 1951 from TCD, where he was also a Scholar. In 1955, he got his PhD at Princeton under William Feller, for a thesis on “Preharmonic Functions.” After a couple of years teaching at Hull University in Kingston upon Hull and Queens University Belfast, he returned to TCD, where he taught for another 35 years. He was elected Fellow of TCD in 1965, and the following year he was appointed Erasmus Smith's Professor of Mathematics at TCD, a position he held until 1989. In 1988 he became a Senior Fellow.

A Quaker, he is a cousin of the author Iris Murdoch.

Selected papers

• Murdoch, B. H. Simple tests for recurrence or transience of infinite sets in random walks on groups. Illinois J. Math. 12 1968 439–450
• Murdoch, B. H. Wiener's tests for atomic Markov chains. Illinois J. Math. 12 1968 35–56.
• Murdoch, B. H. μ-distributed sequences. Proc. Roy. Irish Acad. Sect. A 64 (1966), 143–161 (1966).
• Murdoch, B. H. Rates of growth of preharmonic functions. J. London Math. Soc. 40 (1965), 605–618.
• Murdoch, B. H. Some theorems on preharmonic functions. J. London Math. Soc. 40 (1965), 407–417.
• Murdoch, B. H. A note on well-distributed sequences. Canadian J. Math. 17 (1965), 808–810.
• Murdoch, B. H. A theorem on harmonic functions. J. London Math. Soc. 39 (1964), 581–588.
• Murdoch, Brian Hughes PREHARMONIC FUNCTIONS. Thesis (Ph.D.)–Princeton University. 1954.
• Allen, A. C.; Murdoch, B. H. A note on preharmonic functions. Proc. Amer. Math. Soc. 4 (1953), 842–852.