Biography:Lowell Schoenfeld

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Short description: American mathematician
Lowell Schoenfeld
Lowell Schoenfeld.jpg
Born(1920-04-01)April 1, 1920
DiedFebruary 6, 2002(2002-02-06) (aged 81)
NationalityUnited States
Alma materUniversity of Pennsylvania
Scientific career
FieldsMathematics
ThesisA Transformation Formula in the Theory of Partitions (1944)
Doctoral advisorHans Rademacher
Doctoral studentsSamuel Lawn

Lowell Schoenfeld (April 1, 1920 – February 6, 2002) was an American mathematician known for his work in analytic number theory.

Career

Schoenfeld received his Ph.D. in 1944 from University of Pennsylvania under the direction of Hans Rademacher.

In 1953, as an assistant professor at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, he married (as his second wife) associate professor Josephine M. Mitchell, causing the university to fire her from her tenured position under its anti-nepotism rules while allowing him to keep his more junior tenure-track job. They both resigned in protest, and after several short-term positions they were both able to obtain faculty positions at Pennsylvania State University in 1958.[1] They were both promoted to full professor in 1961, and moved to the University at Buffalo in 1968.[2]

Contributions

Schoenfeld is known for obtaining the following results in 1976, assuming the Riemann hypothesis:

[math]\displaystyle{ |\pi(x)-{\rm li}(x)|\le\frac{\sqrt x\,\ln x}{8\pi} }[/math]

for all x ≥ 2657, based on the prime-counting function π(x) and the logarithmic integral function li(x), and

[math]\displaystyle{ |\psi(x)-x|\le\frac{\sqrt x\,\ln^2 x}{8\pi} }[/math]

for all x ≥ 73.2, based on the second Chebyshev function ψ(x).[3]

References

  1. Rossiter, Margaret W. (1995), Women Scientists in America: Before Affirmative Action, 1940–1972, Johns Hopkins University Press, pp. 125–126, ISBN 9780801857119, https://books.google.com/books?id=i7xDqk0_HTQC&pg=PA125 
  2. "Josephine M. Mitchell, UB Math Professor", Buffalo News, December 31, 2000, https://buffalonews.com/news/josephine-m-mitchell-ub-math-professor/article_99e38849-9885-5c16-ad16-8f219b53a46a.html 
  3.     (1976), "Sharper Bounds for the Chebyshev Functions θ(x) and ψ(x). II", Mathematics of Computation 30 (134): 337–360, doi:10.2307/2005976 .

External links