Person: John, Fritz
Fritz John was a German-born mathematician who worked in partial differential equations and ill-posed problems.
Mathematical Profile (Excerpt):
- This was an unfortunate time for a non-Aryan such as Fritz John to be completing his doctoral studies.
- John published his first paper in 1934; it dealt with Morse theory.
- However, the Council did not have the necessary funds to support the academics who were arriving in Britain and it only became possible to give John support because St John's College, Cambridge offered help.
- This enabled John to spend a year in St John's College as a research scholar.
- The University of Kentucky at Lexington offered John an appointment as assistant professor in 1935 and he emigrated to the United States becoming naturalised in 1941.
- From 1935 till 1946 John lectured at the University of Kentucky where he was promoted to associate professor in 1942.
- John was promoted to professor at New York University in 1951 and continued his association with the Institute of Mathematical Sciences which was set up under Courant's leadership in 1953.
- We mentioned John's early work on the Radon transform earlier in this article.
- Roughly the period between these travel grants marks a second phase in John's work.
- It was in this period that John introduced the space of functions of bounded mean oscillations which plays a fundamental role in harmonic analysis and nonlinear elliptic equations.
- John was appointed to the Courant Chair at the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences at New York University in 1978.
- Many awards were made to John for his mathematical contributions.
- For anyone interested in the analysis of partial differential equations, the work of Fritz John is especially rewarding.
Born 14 June 1910, Berlin, Germany. Died 10 February 1994, New York, USA.
View full biography at MacTutor
Tags relevant for this person:
Origin Germany
Thank you to the contributors under CC BY-SA 4.0! 
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- non-Github:
- @J-J-O'Connor
- @E-F-Robertson
References
Adapted from other CC BY-SA 4.0 Sources:
- O’Connor, John J; Robertson, Edmund F: MacTutor History of Mathematics Archive
