Person: Springer, Tonny Albert
Tonny Springer was a Dutch mathematician who worked on algebra and the theory of linear algebraic groups.
Mathematical Profile (Excerpt):
- Springer had begun publishing mathematical papers well before undertaking the work for his doctoral thesis, having published papers with Nicolaas de Bruijn such as On the zeros of a polynomial and of its derivative (1947) and On the zeros of composition-polynomials (1947).
- After the award of his doctorate, Springer went to France, spending the academic year 1951-52 at the University of Nancy.
- Springer published a proof of the conjecture in Sur les formes quadratiques d'indice zéro Ⓣ(On quadratic forms of zero index) which appeared in Comtes Rendus of the Academy of Sciences in 1952.
- After spending a year in France, Springer returned to the University of Leiden where he was appointed to a position which he held until 1955 when he accepted a lectureship at the University of Utrecht.
- As research interests, Springer gives algebra and the theory of linear algebraic groups.
- We mention the four important books which Springer has written.
- Springer's next book was Invariant theory (1977).
- In 1981 Springer published Linear algebraic groups which was an expanded version of lectures on linear algebraic groups which he gave at the University of Notre Dame in the autumn of 1978.
- The fourth of Springer's books, Octonions, Jordan algebras and exceptional groups (2000), was also based on lectures given by Springer, but these were given in 1963 in German at the University of Göttingen.
- As we have seen from the descriptions of the above books, some have been the result of lecture courses given by Springer at different institutions.
- Indeed, all of the irreducible representations - the building blocks of an arbitrary representation - can be constructed by examining the permutation action on a handful of these Springer fibers.
- Springer's original construction was completely algebraic but was followed by intense activity on the part of many people to give more intrinsically geometric explanations for these representations.
Born 13 February 1926, The Hague, The Netherlands. Died 7 December 2011, Zeist, The Netherlands.
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Origin Netherlands
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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
