Donald J. (D.J.) Newman (July 27, 1930 - March 28, 2007) was an American mathematician and professor, excelling at the Putnam mathematics competition while an undergraduate at City College of New York and New York University, and later receiving his PhD from Harvard University in 1953.[1]

Life and works

Newman was born in Brooklyn, New York in 1930, and studied at New York's famous Stuyvesant High School[2]. He was an avid problem-solver, and as an undergraduate was a Putnam Fellow all three years he took part in the Putnam math competition; only the third person to attain that feat.[3]. His mathematical specialties included complex analysis, approximation theory and number theory. He provided an unusually elementary proof of the prime number theorem.

Newman was a friend and associate of John Nash.[4]:144–145 His career included posts as a Professor of Mathematics at MIT, Brown University, Yeshiva University, Temple University and a distinguished chair at Bar Ilan University in Israel.[5] He held government and industry positions at Avco, Republic Aviation, Bell Laboratories, IBM and the NSA[citation needed].

Newman's love of problem solving comes through in his writing; his published output as a mathematician includes 150 papers and five books. He taught numerous students over the years, including Robert Feinerman, Jonah Mann, Eli Passow, Louis Raymon, and Gerald Weinstein at Yeshiva University, and Bo Gao, Don Kellman, Jonathan Knappenberger, and Yuan Xu at Temple University.

See also

* A Beautiful Mind (book)

Selected publications

* Newman, Donald J. (1960). "A simplified proof of Waring's conjecture". Michigan Math. J. 7 (3): 291–295. doi:10.1307/mmj/1028998439. http://projecteuclid.org/DPubS?service=UI&version=1.0&verb=Display&handle=euclid.mmj/1028998439. Retrieved 2007-04-16.
* --. (1979) Approximation with rational functions. Providence, RI: Conference Board of the Mathematical Sciences by the American Mathematical Society. ISBN 0821816918.
* --. (1982) A problem seminar. New York: Springer. ISBN 0387907653.
* --. (1998) Analytic number theory. New York: Springer. ISBN 0387983082 (#177 in the Graduate Texts in Mathematics series).
* (1996) Complex Analysis. (2004 update w/ Joseph Bak)

Papers and monographs

* The Hexagon Theorem (1982[1])
* Finite type functions as limits of exponential sums (1974, MRC technical summary report)
* Splines and the logarithmic function (1974, MRC)
* Thought Less Mathematics, an essay on why branching thinking and similar solutions aren't central to mathematics and may even obscure deeper ideas

References

1. ^ Though The Math Genealogy Project lists it as 1958.
2. ^ "Stuyvesant Math Team". http://65.104.11.121/MathTeam.html. Retrieved 2007-10-31.
3. ^ See Joseph Gallian's history of the competition and the official MAA record
4. ^ Nasar, Sylvia (1998). A Beautiful Mind. New York: Simon & Schuster. ISBN 0684853701.
5. ^ "In Memoriam: Donald Newman". Temple University. 2007-04-24. http://www.temple.edu/newsroom/2006_2007/04/Stories/InMemoriamNewman.html. Retrieved 2008-08-11.

External links

Donald J. Newman at the Mathematics Genealogy Project