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Thursday, August 23, 2012

Famous Scientist ( Lars Hormander )

-: Lars Hormander :-

Lars Hormander
Lars Valter Hörmander (born 24 January 1931) is a Swedish mathematician who has been called "the foremost contributor to the modern theory of linear partial differential equations". He was awarded the Fields Medal in 1962, the Wolf Prize in 1988, and the Leroy P. Steele Prize in 2006. His Analysis of Linear Partial Differential Operators I–IV is considered a standard work on the subject of linear partial differential operators.

Hörmander applied for professorship at Stockholm University, but temporarily left for the United States while the request was examined. He spent quarters from winter to fall in respective order at the University of Chicago, the University of Kansas, the University of Minnesota, and finally at the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences in New York. These locations offered "much to learn" in partial differential equations, with the exception of Chicago of which he however notes the Antoni Zygmund seminar held by Elias Stein and Guido Weiss to have strengthened his familiarity with harmonic analysis.

Hörmander completed his Ph.D. in 1955 at Lund University. Hörmander then worked at Stockholm University, at Stanford University, and at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey. He returned to Lund University as professor from 1968 until 1996, when he retired with the title of professor emeritus.

Hörmander was born in Mjällby, a village in Blekinge in southern Sweden where his father was a teacher. Like his older brothers and sisters before him, he attended the realskola (elementary school), in a nearby town to which he commuted by train, and the gymnasium (high school) in Lund from which he graduated in 1948.

Hörmander took a one-year break for military service from 1953 to 1954, but due to his position in defense research was able to proceed with his studies even during that time. His Ph.D. thesis On the theory of general partial differential operators was finished in 1955, inspired by the nearly concurrent Ph.D. work of Bernard Malgrange and techniques for hyperbolic differential operators developed by Lars Gårding and Jean Leray.

Hörmander mostly remained at Lund University as professor after 1968, but made several visits to the United States during the two next decades. He visited the Courant Institute in 1970, and also the Institute for Advanced Study in 1971 and during the academic year 1977-1978 when a special year in microlocal analysis was held. He also visited Stanford in 1971, 1977 and 1982, and the University of California, San Diego in the winter 1990. He was briefly director of the Mittag-Leffler Institute in Stockholm between 1984 and 1986, but only accepted a two year appointment as he "suspected that the administrative duties would not agree well" with him, and found that "the hunch was right". He also served as vice president of the International Mathematical Union between 1987 and 1990. Hörmander retired emeritus in Lund in January 1996. In 2006 he was honored with the Leroy P. Steele Prize from the American Mathematical Society.

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