Dickson, Leonard Eugene
$20.00
Noted mathematician, one of 1st US abstract algebra researchers, particularly the theory of finite fields and classical groups, wrote 3-volume 1919-23 “History of the Theory of Numbers”
Description
Type: Signed card
Description: (1874-1954) American mathematician, one of the 1st US researchers in abstract algebra, in particular the theory of finite fields and classical groups, also remembered for a 3-volume history of number theory, “History of the Theory of Numbers” (1919–23). It is still much consulted today, covering divisibility and primality, Diophantine analysis, and quadratic and higher forms and contains essentially every significant number theoretic idea from the dawn of mathematics up to the 1920s except for quadratic reciprocity and higher reciprocity laws.
Dickson earned an 1893 BS and an 1894 MS at the University of Texas and first specialized in geometry. He received a Ph.D. in 1896 at 22 from the University of Chicago, that school’s 1st doctorate in mathematics, for a dissertation titled “The Analytic Representation of Substitutions on a Power of a Prime Number of Letters with a Discussion of the Linear Group”. He went to Leipzig and Paris and returning to the US, became an instructor at the University of California. In 1900, at 26, Dickson was appointed associate professor at Chicago, spending the rest of his career there. He was a visiting professor at the Univ. of California in 1914, 1918, and 1922, returning to Texas to retire in 1939.
He was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1913, also a member of the American Philosophical Society, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (AAAS), the London Mathematical Society, the French Academy of Sciences and the Union of Czech Mathematicians and Physicists. Dickson was 1st recipient of an AAAS prize created in 1924 for his work on the arithmetics of algebras. Harvard (1936) and Princeton (1941) awarded him honorary doctorates. He presided over the American Mathematical Society (AMS) 1917-18. In 1928, he was also the 1st recipient of the annual AMS Cole Prize for Algebra, for his book “Algebren und ihre Zahlentheorie”.
Dickson had a major impact on American mathematics, especially abstract algebra. His mathematical output consists of 18 books and more than 250 papers; The “Collected Mathematical Papers of Leonard Eugene Dickson” fills 6 large volumes. In 1901, Dickson published his 1st book, “Linear groups with an exposition of the Galois field theory”, a revision and expansion of his Ph.D. thesis.
Dickson worked on finite fields and extended the theory of Linear associative algebras initiated by Wedderburn and Cartan, and started the study of modular invariants of a group. He proved many interesting results in number theory using results of Vinogradov to deduce the ideal Waring theorem in his investigations of additive numbed theory.
Signed and insc. 2 x 3 ½ card as “Retired Prof. Math. University of Chicago”
Condition: Very good
