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Joseph Henry Maclagan Wedderburn FRSE FRS (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. He also worked on group theory and matrix algebra. His younger brother was the lawyer Ernest Wedderburn. ==Life== Joseph Wedderburn was the tenth of fourteen children of Alexander Wedderburn of Pearsie, a physician, and Anne Ogilvie. Educated at Forfar Academy and George Watson's College, Edinburgh, in 1898 he entered the University of Edinburgh. In 1903, he published his first three papers, worked as an assistant in the Physical Laboratory of the University, obtained an MA degree with First Class Honours in mathematics, and was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, upon the proposal of George Chrystal, James Gordon MacGregor, Cargill Gilston Knott and William Peddie. He then studied briefly at the University of Leipzig and the University of Berlin, where he met the algebraists Frobenius and Schur. A Carnegie Scholarship allowed him to spend the 1904–1905 academic year at the University of Chicago where he worked with Oswald Veblen, E. H. Moore, and most importantly, Leonard Dickson, who was to become the most important American algebraist of his day. 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''. In 1909, he returned to the United States to become a Preceptor in Mathematics at Princeton University; his colleagues included Luther P. Eisenhart, Oswald Veblen, Gilbert Ames Bliss, and George Birkhoff. Upon the outbreak of the First World War, Wedderburn enlisted in the British Army as a private. He was the first person at Princeton to volunteer for that war, and had the longest war service of anyone on the staff. He served with the Seaforth Highlanders in France, as Lieutenant (1914), then as Captain of the 10th Battalion (1915–18). While a Captain in the Fourth Field Survey Battalion of the Royal Engineers in France, he devised sound-ranging equipment to locate enemy artillery. He returned to Princeton after the war, becoming Associate Professor in 1921 and editing the ''Annals of Mathematics'' until 1928. While at Princeton, he supervised only three PhDs, one of them being Nathan Jacobson. In his later years, Wedderburn became an increasingly solitary figure and may even have suffered from depression. His isolation after his 1945 early retirement was such that his death from a heart attack was not noticed for several days. His Nachlass was destroyed, as per his instructions. 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. In Wedderburn's case his income had gone up so rapidly that he had never been able to accomplish this." (Hooke 1984) 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Joseph Wedderburn」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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