John littlewood mathematician images

He worked on topics relating to analysis , number theory , and differential equations , and had a lengthy collaboration with G. Hardy and Mary Cartwright. In , his father accepted the headmastership of a school in Wynberg, Cape Town, in South Africa, taking his family there. Littlewood returned to Britain in to attend St Paul's School in London, studying under Francis Sowerby Macaulay , an influential algebraic geometer.

He spent his first two years preparing for the Tripos examinations which qualify undergraduates for a bachelor's degree where he emerged in as Senior Wrangler, the person who obtained the highest mark in Part 1 of the Tripos.

John Edensor Littlewood. Littlewood Rouse

In , after completing the second part of the Tripos, he started his research under Ernest Barnes. One of the problems that Barnes suggested to Littlewood was to prove the Riemann hypothesis , an assignment at which he did not succeed. He was elected a Fellow of Trinity College in From October to June he worked as a Richardson Lecturer in the University of Manchester and returned to Cambridge in October , where he remained for the rest of his career.

He was appointed Rouse Ball Professor of Mathematics in , retiring in Most of Littlewood's work was in the field of mathematical analysis. He began research under the supervision of Ernest William Barnes, who suggested that he attempt to prove the Riemann hypothesis : Littlewood showed that if the Riemann hypothesis is true then the prime number theorem follows and obtained the error term.

This work won him his Trinity fellowship. However, the link between the Riemann hypothesis and the prime number theorem had been known before in Continental Europe, and Littlewood wrote later in his book, A Mathematician's Miscellany that his rediscovery of the result did not shed a positive light on the isolated nature of British mathematics at the time.

He coined Littlewood's law, which states that individuals can expect "miracles" to happen to them, at the rate of about one per month. He continued to write papers into his eighties, particularly in analytical areas of what would become the theory of dynamical systems. Littlewood is also remembered for his book of reminiscences, A Mathematician's Miscellany new edition published in