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Hyman Levy (1889 – 1975) was a Scottish mathematician and author.[1]

The son of a Jewish art dealer in Edinburgh, Hyman was the third oldest of eight children.[2] He went to school at George Heriot's School,[3] and was the School Dux.[4] Thanks to scholarships, he was able to go to Germany to study at the University of Göttingen.[2] But because of World War I, Levy had to return to the United Kingdom. Researching aeronautics at the National Physical Laboratory, Levy published papers and books on mathematical applications pertaining to aeronautics. He also wrote about differential equations and probability.[2] After leaving the laboratory, he became a professor of mathematics at the Royal College of Science of Imperial College London where he later served as the head of the department. At Imperial, he is believed to have greatly improved the department of mathematics, and in recognition to his contribution, he later became the dean of the Royal College of Science. [5]

In 1918, he married Marion Aitken Fraser,[3] a Christian woman, despite the disapproval of his family.[2] They had three children. Levy was in the Labour Party from 1920 to 1931, and then in 1931 he joined the British Communist Party. Despite his theoretical allegiance to the principles of communism, Levy became disappointed by the way the Russian communists treated Jews, and published on the topic, leading to his expulsion from the party in 1958.[3]

Following Levy's paper "On Goldbach's Conjecture" from 1963, Lemoine's conjecture is incorrectly referred to by some as "Levy's conjecture."

References

1. ^ Staff,Hyman Levy Gazetteer for Scotland, Retrieved 10 February 2010
2. ^ a b c d staff. Levy Hyman The MacTutor History of Mathematics archive, School of Mathematics and Statistics, University of St Andrews Scotland
3. ^ a b c Facsimile of the Obituary of Levy Hyman, published in The Times, reproduced by St Andrews University
4. ^ http://www.george-heriots.com/former-pupils/other-items-for-fps/school-captains-and-duxes
5. ^ http://www-groups.dcs.st-and.ac.uk/~history/Biographies/Levy_Hyman.html