Mathematician, born in Forfar, Angus, E Scotland, UK. He studied at Edinburgh University, visited Leipzig, Berlin, and Chicago, then returned to Edinburgh as a lecturer (19059). In 1909 he went to Princeton, and settled there after World War 1 until retiring in 1945. His work on algebra includes two fundamental theorems known by his name, one on the classification of semi-simple algebras, the other on finite division rings.
Joseph Henry Maclagan Wedderburn (2 February 1882 Forfar, Angus, Scotland – 9 October 1948, Princeton, New Jersey) was a Scottish mathematician, who taught at Princeton University for most of his career. A significant algebraist, he proved that a finite division algebra is a field, and part of the Artin-Wedderburn theorem on simple algebras.
Life
Joseph Wedderburn was the tenth of 14 children of Alexander Wedderburn, a physician, and Anne Ogilvie.
He then studied briefly at the University of Leipzig and the University of Berlin, where he met the algebraists Frobenius and Schur.
Returning to Scotland in 1905, Wedderburn worked for four years at the University of Edinburgh as an assistant to George Chrystal, who supervised his D.Sc, awarded in 1908 for a thesis titled On Hypercomplex Numbers. From 1906 to 1908, Wedderburn edited the Proceedings of the Edinburgh Mathematical Society.
Upon the outbreak of the First World War, Wedderburn enlisted in the British Army as a private.
He returned to Princeton after the war, becoming Associate Professor in 1921 and editing the Annals of Mathematics until 1928. In his later years, Wedderburn became an increasingly solitary figure and may even have suffered from depression.
Wedderburn received the MacDougall-Brisbane Gold Medal and Prize from the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 1921, and was elected to the Royal Society of London in 1933.
As to why Wedderburn never married:
"It seems that an old Scottish tradition required that a man, before marrying, accumulate savings equal to a certain percentage of his annual income. (Hooke 1984)Work
In all, Wedderburn published about 40 books and papers, making important advances in the theory of rings, algebras and matrix theory.
In 1905, Wedderburn published a paper that included three claimed proofs of a theorem stating that a noncommutative finite field could not exist. Meanwhile, Wedderburn's Chicago colleague Dickson also found a proof of this result but, believing Wedderburn's first proof to be correct, Dickson acknowledged Wedderburn's priority. But Dickson also noted that Wedderburn constructed his second and third proofs only after having seen Dickson's proof.
A corollary to this theorem yields the complete structure of all finite projective geometry. In their paper on "Non-Desarguesian and non-Pascalian geometries" in the 1907 Transactions of the American Mathematical Society, Wedderburn and Veblen showed that in these geometries, Pascal's theorem is a consequence of Desargues' theorem.
Wedderburn's best-known paper was his sole-authored "On hypercomplex numbers," published in the 1907 Proceedings of the London Mathematical Society, and for which he was awarded the D.Sc. He then showed that every semisimple algebra can be constructed as a direct sum of simple algebras and that every simple algebra is isomorphic to a matrix algebra for some division ring.
His best known book is his Lectures on Matrices (1934), which Nathan Jacobson praised as follows:
"That this was the result of a number of years of painstaking labour is evidenced by the bibliography of 661 items (in the revised printing) covering the period 1853 to 1936. (Nathan Jacobson, quoted in Taylor 1949)About Wedderburn's teaching:
"He was apparently a very shy man and much preferred looking at the blackboard to looking at the students.
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