11 Facts About Fritz John

1.

Fritz John was a German-born mathematician specialising in partial differential equations and ill-posed problems.

2.

Fritz John studied mathematics from 1929 to 1933 in Gottingen where he was influenced by Richard Courant, among others.

3.

Fritz John published his first paper in 1934 on Morse theory.

4.

Fritz John was awarded his doctorate in 1934 with a thesis entitled Determining a function from its integrals over certain manifolds from Gottingen.

5.

Fritz John was appointed an assistant professor at the University of Kentucky in 1935 and he emigrated to the United States, becoming naturalised in 1941.

6.

Fritz John stayed at Kentucky until 1946, apart from between 1943 and 1945, during which he did war service for the Ballistic Research Laboratory at the Aberdeen Proving Ground in Maryland.

7.

Fritz John worked in numerical analysis and on ill-posed problems.

8.

Fritz John made several contributions to convex geometry, including his famous result that within every convex body there is one unique ellipsoid of maximal volume, now called the John Ellipsoid.

9.

Fritz John coauthored with Richard Courant the two-volume work Introduction to Calculus and Analysis, first published in 1965.

10.

Fritz John retired in 1981, but continued to work on nonlinear waves.

11.

Fritz John received many awards during his career including the Birkhoff Prize in Applied Mathematics in 1973 and the Steele Prize in 1982.