Person: Gårding, Lars
Lars Gårding was a Swedish mathematician who studied partial differential equations and partial differential operators.
Mathematical Profile (Excerpt):
- Jonas Ruben Gårding was an engineer working at Motala and it was in Motala that Lars grew up.
- When Lars Gårding began his studies at the University of Lund in 1937 he intended to become an actuary.
- Riesz had been appointed to the chair of mathematics at the University of Lund in 1926 and by the time that Gårding studied there Riesz had turned a somewhat mediocre mathematics department into an exciting place of international fame.
- Gårding undertook research for a Ph.D. supervised by Marcel Riesz and was awarded a Ph.D. in 1944 for his thesis On a class of linear transformations connected with group representations.
- This publication was not the first one that Gårding produced, in fact his first paper was The distributions of the first and second order moments, the partial correlation coefficients and the multiple correlation coefficient in samples from a normal multivariate population which appeared in 1941.
- Indeed Gårding was at the University of Cambridge, England, in 1944 and continuing to study relativistic wave equations when, on 1 December 1944, he submitted the paper Relativistic wave equations for zero rest-mass to the Proceedings of the Cambridge Philosophical Society.
- The paper was communicated by P A M Dirac and Gårding gives two addresses on the paper, 'The Institute of Mathematics of the University of Lund, Sweden', and 'Wesley House, Cambridge'.
- Gårding continued to have the University of Lund as his permanent address but made many other visits.
- Dr Lars Gårding for careful examination of the manuscript.
- Gårding was working on similar topics and published The Solution of Cauchy's Problem for Two Totally Hyperbolic Linear Differential Equations by Means of Riesz Integrals which he submitted to the Annals of Mathematics in June 1946.
- In 1947 Gårding was at Princeton University, in the United States, when he submitted Note on continuous representations of Lie groups.
- The Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton was a place where Gårding spent time on eight separate occasions between 1949 and 1977.
- Passing over this very strange note we should say a little about Gårding's marriage at this point.
- In 1952, after Marcel Riesz retired from his chair, Gårding was appointed as a professor at the University of Lund and, in the following year, he was elected as a member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.
- On the other side of our apartment wall lived Lars Gårding.
- He invited me to his apartment to explain to him the use of diffusion processes in deriving properties of the heat equation - at that time this technique appeared bizarre, and he wrote a paper (L Gårding, 'Vecteurs analytiques dans les représentations des groupes de Lie' Ⓣ(Analytical Vectors in Lie Group Representations) (1960)) eliminating probability theory from the proof.
- Gårding would balance a soup bowl on a matchstick over bait, so that he could release the mice alive and unharmed.
- At the University of Lund, Gårding played a major role in the development of the Mathematical Institute.
- There were tensions at Lund University as there were in many universities, but Gårding had a skill of damping down such unrest so the mathematics department was able to function productively through this period.
- Gårding continued in his leadership role until 1975.
- As a research supervisor, Gårding was skilled in suggesting topics for his students' dissertations that were challenging, but not impossible.
- Perhaps his most famous student was Lars Hörmander who had begun research for his doctorate at the University of Lund in 1951 advised by Marcel Riesz but, after Riesz retired in 1952, he was advised by Gårding and was awarded a doctorate in 1955 for his thesis On the Theory of General Partial Differential Equations.
- Perhaps we have insulted several other outstanding mathematicians but suggesting the Hörmander may be Gårding's most famous student.
- We wish to acknowledge our gratitude to Professor Lars Gårding who suggested this problem and whose encouragement and advice made this paper possible.
- He was advised by Gårding and Hörmander.
- Another student of Gårding's who we should mention is Jan-Erik Ingvar Roos (1935-2017) who was awarded a Licentiate in 1958 advised by Gårding.
- Gårding had a career during which he made impressive research contributions to several different areas of mathematics.
- After he retired from his professorship at Lund, Gårding made a major contribution to the history of mathematics with the outstanding book Mathematics and mathematicians.
- It was not only mathematics which interested Gårding.
- Gårding was involved in several of the International Congress of Mathematicians both as a speaker and as an organiser.
- The scientific programme for this Congress was drawn up in close cooperation with the International Mathematical Union, which for this purpose nominated a Consultative Committee which included Gårding as a member.
- The Eva and Lars Gårding Prize, however, was set up by Eva and Lars Gårding during their lifetimes.
- Eva Gårding was also a very good friend.
Born 7 March 1919, Hedemora, Dalarna, Sweden. Died 7 July 2014, Lund, Sweden.
View full biography at MacTutor
Tags relevant for this person:
Origin Sweden
Thank you to the contributors under CC BY-SA 4.0! 
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- @J-J-O'Connor
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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
