Person: Stein, Philip
Philip Stein was a Lithuanian-born mathematician who became a professor of mathematics in South Africa. He worked on the theory of functions of real and complex variables.
Mathematical Profile (Excerpt):
- We have given 25 January 1890 as Philip Stein's birth day, since this is the date he used for his date of birth.
- Stein attended the Normal College Boy's High School in Cape Town and was awarded a minor bursary of £10 tenable for one year in the School Higher Examination of 1905.
- Stein sat the matriculation examination for the South African College in 1906 and was awarded a minor exhibition of £20 tenable for one year.
- In 1909, while at the South African College, Stein won the Ebden Scholarship.
- Returning to South Africa, Stein had a number of different posts before being appointed to the University Technical College of Natal in Pietermaritzburg.
- Stein joined the staff at the Technical College when he was appointed as a lecturer in 1920.
- Up to this point Stein was not a research mathematician and he had never studied for a doctorate.
- While Stein was at Cambridge, J E Littlewood had told him about the problem and Stein solved it in a highly satisfactory way.
- Continuing to work at the University Technical College of Natal, Stein began to collaborate with his colleague R L Rosenberg in the late 1940s.
- As a result of this Stein visited the National Bureau of Standards and there wrote three papers 'The convergence of Seidel iterants of nearly symmetric matrices' (1951), 'A note on bounds of multiple characteristic roots of a matrix' (1952) and 'Some general theorems on iterants' (1952).
- In the 1960's Professor Olga Taussky-Todd suggested further problems to Stein; these are not yet completely solved, but he gave a partial solution of one in 'On the ranges of two functions of positive definite matrices' (1965) and wrote another much quoted paper with Allen Pfeffer, 'On the ranges of two functions of positive definite matrices' (1967), a former student of John Todd.
- In his final year at school, Cooper took the examinations for university entrance conducted by Philip Stein of the University of Natal.
- Stein said that Cooper's mathematics paper was the best he had ever seen.
- Stein was an excellent and conscientious teacher and a force stimulating mathematics at all levels in South Africa for the many years of his active life.
Born 25 January 1890, Germeneitz (near Švėkšna), Šilutė District Municipality, Klaipeda County, Lithuania. Died 7 January 1974, London, England.
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Origin Lithuania
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References
Adapted from other CC BY-SA 4.0 Sources:
- O’Connor, John J; Robertson, Edmund F: MacTutor History of Mathematics Archive
