Norman Levinson

Norman Levinson (August 11, 1912, Lynn, Massachusetts – October 10, 1975, Boston) was an American mathematician. Some of his major contributions were in the study of Fourier transforms, complex analysis, non-linear differential equations, number theory, and signal processing. He worked closely with Norbert Wiener in his early career. He joined the faculty of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1937. In 1954, he was awarded the Bôcher Memorial Prize of the American Mathematical Society. In 1974 he published a paper proving that more than a third of the zeros of the Riemann zeta function lie on the critical line, a result later improved to two fifths by Conrey.

He received both his bachelor's degree and his master's degree in electrical engineering from MIT in 1934, where he had studied under Norbert Wiener and took almost all of the graduate-level courses in mathematics. He received the MIT Redfield Proctor Traveling Fellowship to study at the University of Cambridge, with the assurance that MIT would reward him with a PhD upon his return regardless of whatever he produced at Cambridge. Within the first four months in Cambridge, he had already produced two papers. In 1935, MIT awarded him with the PhD in mathematics.

His death in 1975 was caused by a brain tumor.

See also

• Levinson recursion
• Levinson's inequality

Publications

• Coddington, Earl A.; Levinson, Norman (1955), Theory of ordinary differential equations, McGraw-Hill Book Company, Inc., New York-Toronto-London, ISBN 978-0-89874-755-3, MR 0069338
• Levinson, Norman (1998), Nohel, John A.; Sattinger, David H. (eds.), Selected papers of Norman Levinson. Vol. 1, Contemporary Mathematicians, Boston, MA: Birkhäuser Boston, ISBN 978-0-8176-3862-7, MR 1491093
• Levinson, Norman (1998), Nohel, John A.; Sattinger, David H. (eds.), Selected papers of Norman Levinson. Vol. 2, Contemporary Mathematicians, Boston, MA: Birkhäuser Boston, ISBN 978-0-8176-3979-2, MR 1491093

References

• Norman Levinson at the Mathematics Genealogy Project

External links

• O'Connor, John J.; Robertson, Edmund F., "Norman Levinson", MacTutor History of Mathematics Archive, University of St Andrews