Brian Hughes Murdoch (3 April 1930 – 9 December 2020) was an Irish mathematician who served for 23 years as

Erasmus Smith's Professor of Mathematics The Erasmus Smith's Professor of Mathematics at Trinity College Dublin is one of two endowed mathematics positions at Trinity College Dublin (TCD), the other being the Donegall Lectureship at Trinity College Dublin. It was founded in 1762 and fun ...

Trinity College Dublin , name_Latin = Collegium Sanctae et Individuae Trinitatis Reginae Elizabethae juxta Dublin , motto = ''Perpetuis futuris temporibus duraturam'' (Latin) , motto_lang = la , motto_English = It will last i ...

(TCD). He was an analyst with expertise in potential functions and

random walks In mathematics, a random walk is a random process that describes a path that consists of a succession of random steps on some mathematical space. An elementary example of a random walk is the random walk on the integer number line \mathbb Z ...

.An Irishman's Diary

The Irish Times ''The Irish Times'' is an Irish daily broadsheet newspaper and online digital publication. It launched on 29 March 1859. The editor is Ruadhán Mac Cormaic. It is published every day except Sundays. ''The Irish Times'' is considered a newspaper ...

, January 5, 1985

Career

Born in Worcestershire in England in 1930, Brian Hughes Murdoch grew up in Dublin. He attended Trinity College Dublin, where he won a scholarship in mathematics in 1948. He obtained his BA in mathematics in 1951. In 1955, he got his PhD at

Princeton Princeton University is a private research university in Princeton, New Jersey. Founded in 1746 in Elizabeth as the College of New Jersey, Princeton is the fourth-oldest institution of higher education in the United States and one of the nine ...

under

William Feller William "Vilim" Feller (July 7, 1906 – January 14, 1970), born Vilibald Srećko Feller, was a Croatian-American mathematician specializing in probability theory. Early life and education Feller was born in Zagreb to Ida Oemichen-Perc, a Croa ...

, for a thesis on “Preharmonic Functions.” After a couple of years teaching at

Hull University , mottoeng = Bearing the Torch f learning, established = 1927 – University College Hull1954 – university status , type = Public , endowment = £18.8 million (2016) , budget = £190 million ...

Kingston upon Hull Kingston upon Hull, usually abbreviated to Hull, is a port city and unitary authority in the East Riding of Yorkshire, England. It lies upon the River Hull at its confluence with the Humber Estuary, inland from the North Sea and south-east ...

and

Queen's University Belfast , mottoeng = For so much, what shall we give back? , top_free_label = , top_free = , top_free_label1 = , top_free1 = , top_free_label2 = , top_free2 = , established = , closed = , type = Public research university , parent = ...

, he returned to TCD, where he taught for another 35 years. He was elected Fellow of TCD in 1965, and the following year he was appointed

at TCD, a position he held until he retired in 1989. In 1988 he became a Senior Fellow. A

Quaker Quakers are people who belong to a historically Protestant Christian set of Christian denomination, denominations known formally as the Religious Society of Friends. Members of these movements ("theFriends") are generally united by a belie ...

, he was a second cousin of the author

Iris Murdoch Dame Jean Iris Murdoch ( ; 15 July 1919 – 8 February 1999) was an Irish and British novelist and philosopher. Murdoch is best known for her novels about good and evil, sexual relationships, morality, and the power of the unconscious. Her fi ...

. He died on 9 December 2020.rip.ie death notice
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Selected papers

* Murdoch, B. H. Simple tests for recurrence or transience of infinite sets in random walks on groups. ''Illinois J. Math.'' 12 (1968), 439–450. * Murdoch, B. H. Wiener's tests for atomic Markov chains. ''Illinois J. Math.'' 12 (1968), 35–56. * Murdoch, B. H. μ-distributed sequences. ''Proc. Roy. Irish Acad.'' Sect. A 64 (1966), 143–161. * Murdoch, B. H. Rates of growth of preharmonic functions. ''J. London Math. Soc.'' 40 (1965), 605–618. * Murdoch, B. H. Some theorems on preharmonic functions. ''J. London Math. Soc.'' 40 (1965), 407–417. * Murdoch, B. H. A note on well-distributed sequences. ''Canadian J. Math.'' 17 (1965), 808–810. * Murdoch, B. H. A theorem on harmonic functions. ''J. London Math. Soc.'' 39 (1964), 581–588. * Murdoch, Brian Hughes PREHARMONIC FUNCTIONS. Thesis (Ph.D.)–''Princeton University'' (1954). * Allen, A. C.; Murdoch, B. H. A note on preharmonic functions. ''Proc. Amer. Math. Soc.'' 4 (1953), 842–852.

References

Irish mathematicians Alumni of Trinity College Dublin Fellows of Trinity College Dublin Scholars of Trinity College Dublin 1930 births 2020 deaths {{europe-mathematician-stub