Carl Douglas Olds (11 May 1912 – 11 November 1979) was a New Zealand-born American

mathematician A mathematician is someone who uses an extensive knowledge of mathematics in their work, typically to solve mathematical problems. Mathematicians are concerned with numbers, data, quantity, structure, space, models, and change. History On ...

specializing in

number theory Number theory (or arithmetic or higher arithmetic in older usage) is a branch of pure mathematics devoted primarily to the study of the integers and arithmetic function, integer-valued functions. German mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss (1777� ...

Biography

Carl Olds was born in 1912 in

Wanganui Whanganui (; ), also spelled Wanganui, is a city in the Manawatū-Whanganui region of New Zealand. The city is located on the west coast of the North Island at the mouth of the Whanganui River, New Zealand's longest navigable waterway. Whangan ...

, New Zealand. He was an undergraduate student at

Stanford University Stanford University, officially Leland Stanford Junior University, is a private research university in Stanford, California. The campus occupies , among the largest in the United States, and enrolls over 17,000 students. Stanford is consider ...

, and continued at Stanford as a graduate student, defending his

Ph.D. A Doctor of Philosophy (PhD, Ph.D., or DPhil; Latin: or ') is the most common degree at the highest academic level awarded following a course of study. PhDs are awarded for programs across the whole breadth of academic fields. Because it is ...

thesis ''On the Number of Representations of the Square of an Integer as the Sum of an Odd Number of Squares'' at

in 1943 under the supervision of James V. Uspensky. From 1935 to 1940 and in the summer of 1942, he was an acting instructor at

and from 1940 to 1945, an assistant professor at

Purdue University Purdue University is a public land-grant research university in West Lafayette, Indiana, and the flagship campus of the Purdue University system. The university was founded in 1869 after Lafayette businessman John Purdue donated land and money ...

. From 1945 until his retirement, Olds was based at California State University, San Jose, where he advanced through the ranks to full professor. He died on 11 November 1979 in

Santa Clara, California Santa Clara (; Spanish for " Saint Clare") is a city in Santa Clara County, California. The city's population was 127,647 at the 2020 census, making it the eighth-most populous city in the Bay Area. Located in the southern Bay Area, the cit ...

.Carl D. Olds obituary.
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Recognition

Olds was awarded the 1973

Chauvenet Prize The Chauvenet Prize is the highest award for mathematical expository writing. It consists of a prize of $1,000 and a certificate, and is awarded yearly by the Mathematical Association of America in recognition of an outstanding expository article ...

for his paper "''The Simple

Continued Fraction In mathematics, a continued fraction is an expression (mathematics), expression obtained through an iterative process of representing a number as the sum of its integer part and the multiplicative inverse, reciprocal of another number, then writ ...

Expansion of e''", published in the

American Mathematical Monthly ''The American Mathematical Monthly'' is a mathematical journal founded by Benjamin Finkel in 1894. It is published ten times each year by Taylor & Francis for the Mathematical Association of America. The ''American Mathematical Monthly'' is an e ...

in 1970.Chauvenet Prize recipients
/ref>

Works

Books

*Reviews of ''Geometry of Numbers'': * * * * * * *

Articles

* Olds, Carl D. ''The Simple

Expansion of e '',

The American Mathematical Monthly ''The American Mathematical Monthly'' is a mathematical journal founded by Benjamin Finkel in 1894. It is published ten times each year by Taylor & Francis for the Mathematical Association of America. The ''American Mathematical Monthly'' is an e ...

, Vol. 77, No. 9 (Nov., 1970), pp. 968–974.
URLPDF
* Olds, Carl D. ''The Best Polynomial Approximation of Functions'',

, Vol. 57, No. 9 (Nov., 1950), pp. 617–621.
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* Olds, Carl D. ''Note on an asymmetric

diophantine approximation In number theory, the study of Diophantine approximation deals with the approximation of real numbers by rational numbers. It is named after Diophantus of Alexandria. The first problem was to know how well a real number can be approximated by r ...

'',

Bull. Amer. Math. Soc. The ''Bulletin of the American Mathematical Society'' is a quarterly mathematical journal published by the American Mathematical Society. Scope It publishes surveys on contemporary research topics, written at a level accessible to non-experts. I ...

52 (1946), pp. 261–263.
URL
* Olds, Carl D. ''On the representations, N₃(n²)'',

Volume 47, Number 6 (1941), pp. 499–503.
URL

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Olds, Carl D. 20th-century American mathematicians Purdue University faculty Stanford University alumni Number theorists People from Whanganui 1912 births 1979 deaths New Zealand emigrants to the United States San Jose State University faculty