Norman Levinson

American mathematician

Norman Levinson

Born| (1912-08-11)11 August 1912

Lynn, Massachusetts, US

Died| 10 October 1975(1975-10-10) (aged 63)

Boston, Massachusetts, US

Alma mater| MIT
Known for| Levinson recursion
Levinson's inequality
Awards| Bôcher Memorial Prize (1953)
Chauvenet Prize (1971)
Scientific career
Fields| Mathematics
Thesis|  On the Non-Vanishing of a Function[1]
Doctoral advisor| Norbert Wiener[1]
Doctoral students| Violet B. Haas
Raymond Redheffer
Harold S. Shapiro

Norman Levinson (August 11, 1912 in Lynn, Massachusetts – October 10, 1975 in Boston) was an American mathematician. Some of his major contributions were in the study of Fourier transforms, complex analysis, non-linear differential equations, number theory, and signal processing. He worked closely with Norbert Wiener in his early career. He joined the faculty of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1937. In 1954, he was awarded the Bôcher Memorial Prize of the American Mathematical Society and in 1971 the Chauvenet Prize (after winning in 1970 the Lester R. Ford Award) of the Mathematical Association of America for his paper A Motivated Account of an Elementary Proof of the Prime Number Theorem.[2] In 1974 he published a paper[3] proving that more than a third of the zeros of the Riemann zeta function lie on the critical line, a result later improved to two fifths by Conrey.

He received both his bachelor's degree and his master's degree in electrical engineering from MIT in 1934, where he had studied under Norbert Wiener and took almost all of the graduate-level courses in mathematics. He received the MIT Redfield Proctor Traveling Fellowship to study at the University of Cambridge, with the assurance that MIT would reward him with a PhD upon his return regardless of whatever he produced at Cambridge. Within the first four months in Cambridge, he had already produced two papers. In 1935, MIT awarded him with the PhD in mathematics.

His death in 1975 was caused by a brain tumor. He was married since 1938; his widow Zipporah died at age 93 in 2009. He had two daughters and four grandchildren. Norman Levinson's doctoral students include Raymond Redheffer and Harold Shapiro.[1]

## See also

[edit]

* Levinson recursion
* Levinson's inequality
* Levinson's theorem

## Publications

[edit]

* Levinson, Norman (1940), Gap and density theorems (AMS Colloquium Publications vol. 26), New York: Amer. Math. Soc., ISBN 0-8218-1026-X `{{citation}}`: ISBN / Date incompatibility (help)[4]
* Coddington, Earl A.; Levinson, Norman (1955), Theory of ordinary differential equations, McGraw-Hill Book Company, Inc., New York-Toronto-London, ISBN 978-0-89874-755-3, MR 0069338 `{{citation}}`: ISBN / Date incompatibility (help)[5]
* Levinson, Norman (1998), Nohel, John A.; Sattinger, David H. (eds.), Selected papers of Norman Levinson. Vol. 1, Contemporary Mathematicians, Boston, MA: Birkhäuser Boston, ISBN 978-0-8176-3862-7, MR 1491093
* Levinson, Norman (1998), Nohel, John A.; Sattinger, David H. (eds.), Selected papers of Norman Levinson. Vol. 2, Contemporary Mathematicians, Boston, MA: Birkhäuser Boston, ISBN 978-0-8176-3979-2, MR 1491093

## References

[edit]

1. ^ a b c Norman Levinson at the Mathematics Genealogy Project
2. ^ Levinson, Norman (1969). "A motivated account of an elementary proof of the prime number theorem". American Mathematical Monthly. 76 (3): 225–245\. doi:10.2307/2316361. JSTOR 2316361.
3. ^ Levinson, Norman (1974). "More than one third of zeros of Riemann's zeta-function are on σ = 1/2". Advances in Mathematics. 13 (4): 383–436\. doi:10.1016/0001-8708(74)90074-7.
4. ^ Boas, R. P. (1940). "Review: Norman Levinson, Gap and density theorems". Bulletin of the American Mathematical Society. 47 (7): 543–547\. doi:10.1090/s0002-9904-1941-07484-7.
5. ^ Bellman, Richard (1956). "Review: E. A. Coddington and N. Levinson, Theory of ordinary differential equations". Bulletin of the American Mathematical Society. 62 (2): 185–188\. doi:10.1090/s0002-9904-1956-10026-8.

## External links

[edit]

* O'Connor, John J.; Robertson, Edmund F., "Norman Levinson", MacTutor History of Mathematics Archive, University of St Andrews

* v
* t
* e

Chauvenet Prize recipients

* 1925 G. A. Bliss
* 1929 T. H. Hildebrandt
* 1932 G. H. Hardy
* 1935 Dunham Jackson
* 1938 G. T. Whyburn
* 1941 Saunders Mac Lane
* 1944 R. H. Cameron
* 1947 Paul Halmos
* 1950 Mark Kac
* 1953 E. J. McShane
* 1956 Richard H. Bruck
* 1960 Cornelius Lanczos
* 1963 Philip J. Davis
* 1964 Leon Henkin
* 1965 Jack K. Hale and Joseph P. LaSalle
* 1967 Guido Weiss
* 1968 Mark Kac
* 1970 Shiing-Shen Chern
* 1971 Norman Levinson
* 1972 François Trèves
* 1973 Carl D. Olds
* 1974 Peter D. Lax
* 1975 Martin Davis and Reuben Hersh
* 1976 Lawrence Zalcman
* 1977 W. Gilbert Strang
* 1978 Shreeram S. Abhyankar
* 1979 Neil J. A. Sloane
* 1980 Heinz Bauer
* 1981 Kenneth I. Gross
* 1982 No award given.
* 1983 No award given.
* 1984 R. Arthur Knoebel
* 1985 Carl Pomerance
* 1986 George Miel
* 1987 James H. Wilkinson
* 1988 Stephen Smale
* 1989 Jacob Korevaar
* 1990 David Allen Hoffman
* 1991 W. B. Raymond Lickorish and Kenneth C. Millett
* 1992 Steven G. Krantz
* 1993 David H. Bailey, Jonathan M. Borwein and Peter B. Borwein
* 1994 Barry Mazur
* 1995 Donald G. Saari
* 1996 Joan Birman
* 1997 Tom Hawkins
* 1998 Alan Edelman and Eric Kostlan
* 1999 Michael I. Rosen
* 2000 Don Zagier
* 2001 Carolyn S. Gordon and David L. Webb
* 2002 Ellen Gethner, Stan Wagon, and Brian Wick
* 2003  Thomas C. Hales
* 2004 Edward B. Burger
* 2005 John Stillwell
* 2006 Florian Pfender & Günter M. Ziegler
* 2007 Andrew J. Simoson
* 2008 Andrew Granville
* 2009 Harold P. Boas
* 2010 Brian J. McCartin
* 2011 Bjorn Poonen
* 2012 Dennis DeTurck, Herman Gluck, Daniel Pomerleano & David Shea Vela-Vick
* 2013 Robert Ghrist
* 2014 Ravi Vakil
* 2015 Dana Mackenzie
* 2016 Susan H. Marshall & Donald R. Smith
* 2017 Mark Schilling
* 2018 Daniel J. Velleman
* 2019 Tom Leinster
* 2020 Vladimir Pozdnyakov & J. Michael Steele
* 2021 Travis Kowalski
* 2022 William Dunham, Ezra Brown & Matthew Crawford
* 2023 Kimmo Eriksson & Jonas Eliasson
* 2024 Jeffrey Whitmer

Authority control databases

International|

* ISNI
* VIAF
* FAST
* WorldCat

National|

* Germany
* United States
* France
* BnF data
* Japan
* Czech Republic
* Netherlands
* Norway
* Latvia
* Israel

Academics|

* CiNii
* Mathematics Genealogy Project
* zbMATH
* MathSciNet

Other|

* IdRef
* SNAC

*[v]: View this template
*[t]: Discuss this template
*[e]: Edit this template