Salomon Bochner
Salomon Bochner | |
|---|---|
| Alma mater | University of Berlin |
| Known for | Bochner integral Bochner's theorem |
| Scientific career | |
| Fields | Mathematics |
| Doctoral advisor | Erhard Schmidt |
| Doctoral students | Richard Askey Jeff Cheeger Hillel Furstenberg Israel Halperin M. T. Cheng |
Salomon Bochner (20 August 1899 – 2 May 1982) was an American mathematician of Austrian-Hungarian origin, known for wide-ranging work in mathematical analysis, probability theory and differential geometry.
Life
He was born into a Jewish Family in Podgórze (near Kraków), then Austria-Hungary, now Poland. He studied at the University of Warsaw. Fearful of a Russian invasion in Galicia at the beginning of World War I in 1914, his family moved to Germany, seeking greater security. Bochner was educated at a Berlin gymnasium (secondary school), and then at the University of Berlin. There, he was a student of Erhard Schmidt, writing a dissertation involving what would later be called the Bergman kernel. Shortly after this, he left the academy to help his family during the escalating inflation. After returning to mathematical research, he lectured at the University of Munich from 1924 to 1933. His academic career in Germany ended after the Nazis came to power in 1933, and he left for a position at Princeton University. He died in Houston, Texas. He was an Orthodox Jew.[1]
Mathematical work
In 1925 he started work in the area of almost periodic functions, simplifying the approach of Harald Bohr by use of compactness and approximate identity arguments. In 1933 he defined the Bochner integral, as it is now called, for vector-valued functions. Bochner's theorem on Fourier transforms appeared in a 1932 book. His techniques came into their own as Pontryagin duality and then the representation theory of locally compact groups developed in the following years.
Subsequently he worked on multiple Fourier series, posing the question of the Bochner-Riesz means. This led to results on how the Fourier transform on Euclidean space behaves under rotations.
In differential geometry, Bochner's formula on curvature from 1946 was most influential. Joint work with Kentaro Yano (1912–1993) led to the 1953 book Curvature and Betti Numbers. It had broad consequences, for the Kodaira vanishing theory, representation theory, and spin manifolds. Bochner also worked on several complex variables (the Bochner-Martinelli formula and the book Several Complex Variables from 1948 with W. T. Martin).
See also
Secondary literature
- Cooke, Roger, 2005, "Lectures on Fourier integrals" in Grattan-Guinness, I., ed., Landmark Writings in Western Mathematics. Elsevier: 945–59.