Joseph Wedderburn (nonfiction)
Joseph Henry Maclagan Wedderburn FRSE FRS (2 February 1882, Forfar, Angus, Scotland – 9 October 1948, Princeton, New Jersey) was a Scottish mathematician who made important advances in the theory of rings, algebras, group theory, and matrix algebra. He taught at Princeton University for most of his career.
In 1898 Wedderburn entered the University of Edinburgh. In 1903, he published his first three papers, worked as an assistant in the Physical Laboratory of the University, obtained an MA degree with First Class Honours in mathematics, and was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, upon the proposal of George Chrystal, James Gordon MacGregor, Cargill Gilston Knott, and William Peddie.
Wedderburn was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, upon the proposal of George Chrystal, James Gordon MacGregor, Cargill Gilston Knott, and William Peddie.
He then studied briefly at the University of Leipzig and the University of Berlin, where he met the algebraists Frobenius and Issai Schur. A Carnegie Scholarship allowed him to spend the 1904–1905 academic year at the University of Chicago where he worked with Oswald Veblen, E. H. Moore, and most importantly, Leonard Dickson, who was to become the most important American algebraist of his day.
Returning to Scotland in 1905, Wedderburn worked for four years at the University of Edinburgh as an assistant to George Chrystal, who supervised his D.Sc, awarded in 1908 for a thesis titled On Hypercomplex Numbers.
From 1906 to 1908, Wedderburn edited the Proceedings of the Edinburgh Mathematical Society. In 1909, he returned to the United States to become a Preceptor in Mathematics at Princeton University; his colleagues included Luther P. Eisenhart, Oswald Veblen, Gilbert Ames Bliss, and George Birkhoff.
A significant algebraist, Wedderburn proved that a finite division algebra is a field; part of the Artin–Wedderburn theorem on simple algebras.
Wedderburn's best-known paper was his sole-authored "On hypercomplex numbers," published in the 1907 Proceedings of the London Mathematical Society, and for which he was awarded the D.Sc. the following year. This paper gives a complete classification of simple and semisimple algebras. He then showed that every semisimple algebra finite-dimensional can be constructed as a direct sum of simple algebras and that every simple algebra is isomorphic to a matrix algebra for some division ring. The Artin–Wedderburn theorem generalises this result, with the ascending chain condition.
Upon the outbreak of the First World War, Wedderburn enlisted in the British Army as a private. He was the first person at Princeton to volunteer for that war, and had the longest war service of anyone on the staff. He served with the Seaforth Highlanders in France, as Lieutenant (1914), then as Captain of the 10th Battalion (1915–18). While a Captain in the Fourth Field Survey Battalion of the Royal Engineers in France, he devised sound-ranging equipment to locate enemy artillery.
He returned to Princeton after the war, becoming Associate Professor in 1921 and editing the Annals of Mathematics until 1928. While at Princeton, he supervised only three PhDs, one of them being Nathan Jacobson.
In his later years, Wedderburn became an increasingly solitary figure and may have suffered from depression. His isolation after his 1945 early retirement was such that his death from a heart attack was not noticed for several days.
His Nachlass was destroyed, as per his instructions.
Wedderburn received the MacDougall-Brisbane Gold Medal and Prize from the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 1921, and was elected to the Royal Society of London in 1933.
As to why Wedderburn never married:
"It seems that an old Scottish tradition required that a man, before marrying, accumulate savings equal to a certain percentage of his annual income. In Wedderburn's case his income had gone up so rapidly that he had never been able to accomplish this." (Hooke 1984)
About Wedderburn's teaching:
"He was apparently a very shy man and much preferred looking at the blackboard to looking at the students. He had the galley proofs from his book "Lectures on Matrices" pasted to cardboard for durability, and his lecturing consisted of reading this out loud while simultaneously copying it onto the blackboard." (Hooke 1984)
In the News
Fiction cross-reference
Nonfiction cross-reference
- Cargill Gilston Knott (nonfiction)
- E. H. Moore (nonfiction)
- George Birkhoff (nonfiction)
- George Chrystal (nonfiction)
- Gilbert Ames Bliss (nonfiction)
- Issai Schur (nonfiction)
- James Gordon MacGregor (nonfiction)
- Leonard Eugene Dickson (nonfiction)
- Luther P. Eisenhart (nonfiction)
- Mathematician (nonfiction)
- Merrill Flood (nonfiction)
- Nathan Jacobson (nonfiction) - Doctoral student
- Oswald Veblen (nonfiction)
- William Peddie (nonfiction)
External links:
- Joseph Wedderburn @ Wikipedia