William Fogg Osgood

William Fogg Osgood
Born (1864-03-10)March 10, 1864
Boston, Massachusetts
Died July 22, 1943(1943-07-22) (aged 79)
Belmont, Massachusetts
Resting place Forest Hills Cemetery, Boston
Nationality American
Fields Mathematics
Institutions Harvard University, Friedrich-Alexander-University, Erlangen-Nuremberg
Alma mater Harvard University, University of Göttingen, Friedrich-Alexander-University, Erlangen-Nuremberg
Doctoral students David Raymond Curtiss
Known for Complex analysis, conformal mapping, calculus of variations
Spouse Teresa Osgood, Celeste Phelpes Morse
Children 3

William Fogg Osgood (March 10, 1864, Boston - July 22, 1943, Belmont, Massachusetts) was an American mathematician, born in Boston.

Education and career

In 1886, he graduated from Harvard, where, after studying at the universities of Göttingen (1887–1889) and Erlangen (Ph.D., 1890), he was instructor (1890–1893), assistant professor (1893–1903), and thenceforth professor of mathematics. He became professor emeritus in 1933. Osgood was chairman of the department of mathematics in Harvard from 1918 to 1922.

From 1899 to 1902, he served as editor of the Annals of Mathematics and in 1904–1905 was president of the American Mathematical Society, whose Transactions he edited in 1909–1910.

Contributions

The works of Osgood dealt with complex analysis, in particular conformal mapping and uniformization of analytic functions, and calculus of variations. He was invited by Felix Klein to write an article on complex analysis in the Enzyklopädie der mathematischen Wissenschaften which was later expanded in the book Lehrbuch der Funktionentheorie.

Osgood curves, Jordan curves with positive area, are named after Osgood, who published a paper proving their existence in 1903.[1]

Besides his research on analysis, Osgood was also interested in mathematical physics and wrote on the theory of the gyroscope.

Awards and honors

In 1904, he was elected to the National Academy of Sciences.

Personal

Osgood's cousin, Louise Osgood, was the mother of Bernard Koopman.[2]

Selected publications

Osgood's books include:

See also

Notes

  1. Osgood, William F. (1903), "A Jordan Curve of Positive Area", Transactions of the American Mathematical Society 4: 107–112, doi:10.1090/S0002-9947-1903-1500628-5, ISSN 0002-9947, JFM 34.0533.02, JSTOR 1986455, MR 1500628.
  2. See his obituary by Morse (1982).

References

External links

 This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Gilman, D. C.; Thurston, H. T.; Colby, F. M., eds. (1905). "article name needed". New International Encyclopedia (1st ed.). New York: Dodd, Mead. 

This article is issued from Wikipedia - version of the Sunday, March 06, 2016. The text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution/Share Alike but additional terms may apply for the media files.