William Fogg Osgood
William Fogg Osgood (March 10, 1864, Boston – July 22, 1943, Belmont, Massachusetts) was an American mathematician, born in Boston.
William Fogg Osgood | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Born | March 10, 1864 Boston, Massachusetts |
| Died | July 22, 1943 (aged 79) |
| Resting place | Forest Hills Cemetery, Boston |
| Nationality | American |
| Alma mater | Harvard University, University of Göttingen, Friedrich-Alexander-University, Erlangen-Nuremberg |
| Known for | Complex analysis, conformal mapping, calculus of variations |
| Spouse(s) | Teresa Osgood, Celeste Phelpes Morse |
| Children | 3 |
| Scientific career | |
| Fields | Mathematics |
| Institutions | Harvard University, Friedrich-Alexander-University, Erlangen-Nuremberg |
| Doctoral students | David Raymond Curtiss |
Education and career
In 1886, he graduated from Harvard, where, after studying at the universities of Göttingen (1887–1889) and Erlangen (Ph.D., 1890), he was instructor (1890–1893), assistant professor (1893–1903), and thenceforth professor of mathematics. He became professor emeritus in 1933. Osgood was chairman of the department of mathematics in Harvard from 1918 to 1922.
From 1899 to 1902, he served as editor of the Annals of Mathematics and in 1904–1905 was president of the American Mathematical Society, whose Transactions he edited in 1909–1910.
Contributions
The works of Osgood dealt with complex analysis, in particular conformal mapping and uniformization of analytic functions, and calculus of variations. He was invited by Felix Klein to write an article on complex analysis in the Enzyklopädie der mathematischen Wissenschaften which was later expanded in the book Lehrbuch der Funktionentheorie.
Osgood curves, Jordan curves with positive area, are named after Osgood, who published a paper proving their existence in 1903.[1]
Besides his research on analysis, Osgood was also interested in mathematical physics and wrote on the theory of the gyroscope.
Awards and honors
In 1904, he was elected to the National Academy of Sciences.
Personal
Osgood's cousin, Louise Osgood, was the mother of Bernard Koopman.[2]
Selected publications
Osgood's books include:
- Introduction to Infinite Series (Harvard University Press 1897; third edition, 1906)
- (with W. C. Graustein) Plane and solid analytic geometry (Macmillan, NY, 1921)
- Lehrbuch der Funktionentheorie (Teubner, Berlin, 1907; second edition, 1912)
- First Course in Differential and Integral Calculus (1907; revised edition, 1909)
- Elementary calculus (MacMillan, NY, 1921)
- Mechanics (MacMillan, NY, 1937)
See also
- Riemann mapping theorem
- Osgood–Brown theorem
- Osgood's lemma
Notes
- Osgood, William F. (1903), "A Jordan Curve of Positive Area" (PDF), Transactions of the American Mathematical Society, 4: 107–112, doi:10.1090/S0002-9947-1903-1500628-5, ISSN 0002-9947, JFM 34.0533.02, JSTOR 1986455, MR 1500628.
- See his obituary by Morse (1982).
References
- American Mathematical Society (2011), "39. Charles Bradford Morrey, Jr. (1907–1984)", AMS Presidents: A Timeline, Providence, RI: University of California, Berkeley, retrieved October 31, 2011.
- Archibald, Raymond Clare (1938), A Semicentennial History of the American Mathematical Society, 1888--1938. Volume I, Providence, RI: American Mathematical Society, p. 262, ISBN 0-8218-0118-X, JFM 64.0004.01, MR 0959537, Zbl 0019.24305.
- J. L. Coolidge, G. D. Birkhoff & E. C. Kemble (1943) William Fogg Osgood, Science 98:399–400 (issue #2549).
- Koopman, Bernard Osgood (March 1944), "William Fogg Osgood—In memoriam", Bulletin of the American Mathematical Society, 50 (3): 139–142, doi:10.1090/s0002-9904-1944-08080-4, MR 0010143, Zbl 0060.01703.
- Morse, Philip M. (1982), "In Memoriam: Bernard Osgood Koopman, 1900–1981", Operations Research, 30 (3): viii+417–427, doi:10.1287/opre.30.3.417, JSTOR 170181.
- Walsh, J. L. (1973), "History of the Riemann mapping theorem", The American Mathematical Monthly, 80: 270–276, ISSN 0002-9890, JSTOR 2318448, MR 0323996, Zbl 0273.30003.
- Walsh, Joseph L. (2002), "William Fogg Osgood", in National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America (ed.), Biographical Memoirs, Volume 81, Washington, D.C.: National Academy Press, pp. 246–257.
External links
- O'Connor, John J.; Robertson, Edmund F. (August 2005), "William Fogg Osgood", MacTutor History of Mathematics archive, University of St Andrews.
- William Fogg Osgood at the Mathematics Genealogy Project
This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Gilman, D. C.; Peck, H. T.; Colby, F. M., eds. (1905). New International Encyclopedia (1st ed.). New York: Dodd, Mead. Missing or empty |title= (help)
