Timeline for Selberg's advisor?
Current License: CC BY-SA 2.5
21 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Jul 30, 2010 at 19:50 | vote | accept | anon | ||
| Jul 22, 2010 at 11:27 | comment | added | Jim Humphreys | As others have noted, the role of the advisor (if any) is variable and sometimes negligible. It's interesting for example to ponder who was the advisor of Robert Langlands at Yale, and what if anything that person had to do with his future work. (I have seen two answers to the specific question about Langlands, the person listed at Math Genealogy and another related person.) | |
| Jul 22, 2010 at 11:07 | comment | added | Anweshi | I once watched a video of Dorian Goldfeld in which he was saying that he spent considerable time with Selberg during postdoc days in Israel, and that in this sense he was almost like Selberg's student. The video should be somewhere in the IAS website in the sequence for remembering Atle Selberg. | |
| Jul 22, 2010 at 10:06 | answer | added | K.J. Moi | timeline score: 26 | |
| Jul 22, 2010 at 8:44 | comment | added | Harald Hanche-Olsen | As an amusing aside, since there was no formal requirements for course work or previous education to hand in a thesis for the dr.philos. degree, there certainly were crackpot theses. The math department had a number of them in their archive. I have looked at one of them, a gentleman from western Norway who claimed to have solved angle trisection and the doubling of the cube. All neatly handwritten in French with religious commentary interspersed. It took me about an hour to find the mistake in the angle trisection part. | |
| Jul 22, 2010 at 8:39 | comment | added | Harald Hanche-Olsen | I can certainly confirm that when I was a student at the University of Oslo in the 1970s, there was no formal PhD program in the modern sense. To obtain a degree, you just handed in a thesis. The faculty would then appoint a committee to evaluate the thesis, and if it passed muster, they would declare it “worthy of defense for the dr.philos. degree”. Then there would be an official defense, and the degree awarded. But there was no advisor, formally speaking. In practice, there would typically be a mentor of sorts. | |
| Jul 22, 2010 at 8:10 | comment | added | Victor Protsak | So if you are interested about scientific influences on Selberg, you should investigate where he studied (another common tradition from those times was to travel to Goettingen or another big center for a semester or a year and work with someone there) and who his professors were. | |
| Jul 22, 2010 at 8:08 | comment | added | Victor Protsak | Both the notion of advisor (in the recent US sense) and the tradition of thanking him in your early papers are comparatively new phenomenae. If you go back 80 years, many people in the German system started publishing when they were in their early 20s and they wrote a Habilitation after they already became established mathematicians. So the right notion of "advisor" is closer to the Russian one (undergraduate, or diploma thesis advisor), but in many cases, instead of a formal advisor, there would be a professor running a seminar that included other, "non-tenured", faculty playing this role. | |
| Jul 22, 2010 at 5:16 | answer | added | Greg Kuperberg | timeline score: 13 | |
| Jul 22, 2010 at 3:02 | comment | added | Philip Brooker | Wadim, thanks for your very satisfactory reply to my comment. | |
| Jul 22, 2010 at 2:51 | comment | added | Wadim Zudilin | Philip, I've read Selberg's first articles (in German) and already at the time of reading could not understand why he had not acknowledge a single person. That's why I've got an impression that Atle was an amateur. | |
| Jul 22, 2010 at 2:18 | comment | added | Philip Brooker | Perhaps looking at his early papers (if you can obtain them and understand the language) would reveal some clue (in the acknowledgements, for example) as to people who at least influenced him in some way? | |
| Jul 22, 2010 at 2:12 | answer | added | Will Jagy | timeline score: 9 | |
| Jul 22, 2010 at 2:08 | answer | added | Wadim Zudilin | timeline score: 5 | |
| Jul 22, 2010 at 1:56 | comment | added | anon | If anything "math geneanology project" is not accurate; because Selberg had exactly one PhD student (it says "none" on the site). He (Selberg's unique PhD student) might be the right person to ask, if nobody on MO knows. | |
| Jul 22, 2010 at 1:54 | comment | added | anon | I read that article Qiaochu and there was nothing. | |
| Jul 22, 2010 at 1:53 | comment | added | Qiaochu Yuan | There was an article in the Notices about Selberg around the time of his passing. There might be informtion there. | |
| Jul 22, 2010 at 1:52 | comment | added | anon | As far as I know Selberg obtained a formal PhD from a Scandinavian university, sometimes during the war (he mentions in an interview that he got his PhD right before the university was closed down by the Germans). So I would assume he had an advisor :-) | |
| Jul 22, 2010 at 1:51 | comment | added | Charles Staats | It also says that he had a PhD. | |
| Jul 22, 2010 at 1:46 | comment | added | Wadim Zudilin | Mathematics Genealogy Project, genealogy.math.ndsu.nodak.edu/id.php?id=121277, says that the advisor is unknown. Atle could be an amateur! | |
| Jul 22, 2010 at 1:39 | history | asked | anon | CC BY-SA 2.5 |