Person: Verblunsky, Samuel
Samuel Verblunsky was an English mathematician who worked on orthogonal polynomials and harmonic functions.
Mathematical Profile (Excerpt):
- We note that some sources give Poland as the country of birth of both Elcono Verblunsky and Leah Foner but they themselves give Russia on their census forms.
- Elcono Verblunsky, who in the early 1900s was living at 121 Hanbury Street, Mile End New Town, London, became a naturalised British citizen on 7 August 1903.
- Verblunsky's school education was in London and he entered Magdalene College, Cambridge in 1924 having won a scholarship to study mathematics.
- Verblunsky was taught by G H Hardy and J E Littlewood and was ranked First Class in both parts of the Mathematical Tripos.
- Before the award of his doctorate, Verblunsky began to publish a remarkable high volume of papers.
- These papers were all published before he was awarded a Ph.D. With eight papers appearing in these Proceedings in 1930 one might believe that this was the only journal in which Verblunsky published at this time.
- Among the results that Verblunsky proved in his early papers was that a trigonometric series cannot be summable (C,1)(C, 1)(C,1) to 0 unless its coefficients are nul, thus confirming a 1911 conjecture of Marcel Riesz.
- After the award of a Ph.D. from the University of Cambridge, Verblunsky remained at Cambridge being elected as a fellow of Magdalene College.
- At this point Verblunsky stopped publishing in the Mathematical Proceedings of the Cambridge Philosophical Society and over the following few years the Proceedings does not contain any of his papers.
- From 1931 onwards, however, numerous papers by Verblunsky were published by the London Mathematical Society.
- At some stage Verblunsky left Cambridge when he was appointed as a lecturer at the University of Manchester.
- A contribution to the algebra of Fourier series while the second, which contains a proof of what today is called Verblunsky's Theorem, was On positive harmonic functions.
- It is based on notes of lectures delivered by Verblunsky to students in their first year at the University of Manchester.
- To this reviewer it seems that Verblunsky has succeeded admirably in his effort to write a rigorous and accurate introduction to the theory of functions of a real variable.
- In 1939, the year his book was published, Verblunsky was appointed as a Professor of Mathematics at Queen's University, Belfast.
- the authors wish to express their gratitude to Professor S Verblunsky of Belfast, for his helpful criticism and advice.
- After he retired from his chair at Queen's University, Belfast, Verblunsky moved away from the city but remained living in Northern Ireland.
- The Verblunsky Room is in De Morgan House, Russell Square, London and at present it is a Members' Room housing the London Mathematical Society's special collections consisting of the Hardy Collection and the Philippa Fawcett Collection.
- MathSciNet lists 17 papers with 'Verblunsky coefficients' in the title and another 73 with this term in the review text.
- It also lists 10 papers with 'Verblunsky parameters' in the review text, all published since 2007.
Born 25 June 1906, Whitechapel, London, England. Died 1996, Northern Ireland.
View full biography at MacTutor
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Origin England
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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
