Person: Vandiver, Harry Schultz

Harry Vandiver was an American mathematician, known for work in number theory.

Vandiver joined the United States Naval Reserve and continued to serve until 1919 when the war had ended.
After leaving the Naval Reserve, Birkhoff persuaded Vandiver to become a professional mathematician and to accept a post at Cornell University in 1919.
It is his life-long work on Fermat's Last Theorem for which he is best known, but Vandiver also wrote papers on cyclotomic fields, Bernoulli numbers, the reciprocity laws, finite fields, techniques for factorisation, semigroups, semirings, and algebras.
A conjecture, now known as 'Vandiver's conjecture', concerning the class group of cyclotomic fields was so named since Vandiver frequently posed it.
Although the Cole Prize might be considered Vandiver's greatest distinction, we should also mention that he was vice-president of the American Mathematical Society in 1934-35 and was the Colloquium Lecturer at Ann Arbor in 1935 when he lectured on Fermat's Last Theorem.
It is worth noting that Vandiver continued to hold strong views against public education and Frank was privately tutored to first degree level without attending high school or university.

Born 21 October 1882, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA. Died 9 January 1973, Austin, Texas, USA.

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Astronomy, Origin Usa, Number Theory

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O’Connor, John J; Robertson, Edmund F: MacTutor History of Mathematics Archive