Laurence Chisholm Young (14 July 1905 – 24 December 2000) was a British mathematician known for his contributions to

measure theory In mathematics, the concept of a measure is a generalization and formalization of geometrical measures ( length, area, volume) and other common notions, such as mass and probability of events. These seemingly distinct concepts have many simil ...

, the

calculus of variations The calculus of variations (or Variational Calculus) is a field of mathematical analysis that uses variations, which are small changes in functions and functionals, to find maxima and minima of functionals: mappings from a set of functions t ...

, optimal control theory, and potential theory. He was the son of William Henry Young and

Grace Chisholm Young Grace Chisholm Young (née Chisholm, 15 March 1868 – 29 March 1944) was an English mathematician. She was educated at Girton College, Cambridge, England and continued her studies at Göttingen University in Germany, where in 1895 she receive ...

, both prominent mathematicians. He moved to the US in 1949 but never sought American citizenship. The concept of

Young measure In mathematical analysis, a Young measure is a parameterized measure that is associated with certain subsequences of a given bounded sequence of measurable functions. They are a quantification of the oscillation effect of the sequence in the limi ...

is named after him: he also introduced the concept of the

generalized curve A generalization is a form of abstraction whereby common properties of specific instances are formulated as general concepts or claims. Generalizations posit the existence of a domain or set of elements, as well as one or more common character ...

and a concept of generalized surface which later evolved in the concept of

varifold In mathematics, a varifold is, loosely speaking, a measure-theoretic generalization of the concept of a differentiable manifold, by replacing differentiability requirements with those provided by rectifiable sets, while maintaining the general a ...

. The Young integral also is named after him and has now been generalised in the theory of

rough paths In stochastic analysis, a rough path is a generalization of the notion of smooth path allowing to construct a robust solution theory for controlled differential equations driven by classically irregular signals, for example a Wiener process. The th ...

Life and academic career

Laurence Chisholm Young was born in Göttingen,. the fifth of the six children of William Henry Young and

.. He held positions of Professor at the University of Cape Town, South Africa, and at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He was also a chess grandmaster.Grace Chisholm Young at Biographies of Women Mathematicians
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Selected publications

Books

*, available from the Internet archive. *. *.

Papers

*. *, memoir presented by

Stanisław Saks Stanisław Saks (30 December 1897 – 23 November 1942) was a Polish mathematician and university tutor, a member of the Lwów School of Mathematics, known primarily for his membership in the Scottish Café circle, an extensive monograph on the th ...

at the session of 16 December 1937 of the

Warsaw Society of Sciences and Letters Warsaw ( pl, Warszawa, ), officially the Capital City of Warsaw,, abbreviation: ''m.st. Warszawa'' is the capital and largest city of Poland. The metropolis stands on the River Vistula in east-central Poland, and its population is officially ...

. The free

PDF Portable Document Format (PDF), standardized as ISO 32000, is a file format developed by Adobe in 1992 to present documents, including text formatting and images, in a manner independent of application software, hardware, and operating systems. ...

copy is made available by th
RCIN –Digital Repository of the Scientifics Institutes
*. *. *. *. *. *. *. *.

Notes

References

Biographical and general references

* *, including a reply by L. C. Young himself (pages 109–112). *.

Scientific references

*. One of the most complete monographs on the theory of

s, strongly oriented to applications in continuum mechanics of fluids. *. A thorough scrutiny of

s and their various generalization is in Chapter 3 from the perspective of convex compactifications. *. *. An extended version of with a list of Almgren's publications.

External links

*
Obituary on University of Wisconsin web site
* {{DEFAULTSORT:Young, Laurence Chisholm 20th-century British mathematicians Alumni of Trinity College, Cambridge Mathematical analysts Scientists from Göttingen 1905 births 2000 deaths Variational analysts British historians of mathematics Instituto Nacional de Matemática Pura e Aplicada researchers