Edwin Hewitt (January 20, 1920,

Everett, Washington Everett is the county seat and largest city of Snohomish County, Washington, United States. It is north of Seattle and is one of the main cities in the metropolitan area and the Puget Sound region. Everett is the seventh-largest city in the ...

– June 21, 1999) was an 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 ...

known for his work in abstract

harmonic analysis Harmonic analysis is a branch of mathematics concerned with the representation of functions or signals as the superposition of basic waves, and the study of and generalization of the notions of Fourier series and Fourier transforms (i.e. an ex ...

and for his discovery, in collaboration with Leonard Jimmie Savage, of the

Hewitt–Savage zero–one law The Hewitt–Savage zero–one law is a theorem in probability theory, similar to Kolmogorov's zero–one law and the Borel–Cantelli lemma, that specifies that a certain type of event will either almost surely happen or almost surely not happen. I ...

. He received his Ph.D. in 1942 from

Harvard University Harvard University is a private Ivy League research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Founded in 1636 as Harvard College and named for its first benefactor, the Puritan clergyman John Harvard, it is the oldest institution of highe ...

, and served on the faculty of mathematics at the

University of Washington The University of Washington (UW, simply Washington, or informally U-Dub) is a public research university in Seattle, Washington. Founded in 1861, Washington is one of the oldest universities on the West Coast; it was established in Seatt ...

from 1954. Hewitt pioneered the construction of the

hyperreals In mathematics, the system of hyperreal numbers is a way of treating infinite and infinitesimal (infinitely small but non-zero) quantities. The hyperreals, or nonstandard reals, *R, are an extension of the real numbers R that contains number ...

by means of an

ultrapower The ultraproduct is a mathematical construction that appears mainly in abstract algebra and mathematical logic, in particular in model theory and set theory. An ultraproduct is a quotient of the direct product of a family of structures. All factor ...

construction (Hewitt, 1948). Hewitt wrote the 1975 English translation of A. A. Kirillov's 1972 Russian

monograph A monograph is a specialist work of writing (in contrast to reference works) or exhibition on a single subject or an aspect of a subject, often by a single author or artist, and usually on a scholarly subject. In library cataloging, ''monogra ...

''Elements of the Theory of Representations'' (Элементы Теории Представлений), and co-authored ''Abstract Harmonic Analysis'' with Kenneth A. Ross (1st edn., 1st vol. in 1963; 1st edn., 2nd vol. in 1970), an extensive work in two volumes.

Publications

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References

Edwin Hewitt's work in analysis ''in'' Topological Commentary 4 (2)
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by mathematician Walter Schempp Probability theorists 1920 births 1999 deaths 20th-century American mathematicians Mathematical analysts Harvard University alumni University of Washington faculty People from Everett, Washington {{US-mathematician-stub

See also

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