Laurence Chisholm Young (14 July 1905 – 24 December 2000) was a British

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 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,

optimal control theory Mathematical optimization (alternatively spelled ''optimisation'') or mathematical programming is the selection of a best element, with regard to some criterion, from some set of available alternatives. It is generally divided into two subfi ...

, and

potential theory In mathematics and mathematical physics, potential theory is the study of harmonic functions. The term "potential theory" was coined in 19th-century physics when it was realized that two fundamental forces of nature known at the time, namely gravi ...

. He was the son of

William Henry Young William Henry Young FRS (London, 20 October 1863 – Lausanne, 7 July 1942) was an English mathematician. Young was educated at City of London School and Peterhouse, Cambridge. He worked on measure theory, Fourier series, differential ca ...

and Grace Chisholm Young, both prominent mathematicians. He moved to the US in 1949 but never sought American citizenship. The concept of Young measure is named after him: he also introduced the concept of the generalized curve 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 Göttingen (, , ; nds, Chöttingen) is a college town, university city in Lower Saxony, central Germany, the Capital (political), capital of Göttingen (district), the eponymous district. The River Leine runs through it. At the end of 2019, t ...

,. the fifth of the six children of

and Grace Chisholm Young.. 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 The Internet Archive is an American digital library with the stated mission of "universal access to all knowledge". It provides free public access to collections of digitized materials, including websites, software applications/games, music, ...

. *. *.

Papers

*. *, memoir presented by Stanisław Saks 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 official ...

. The free

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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 Young measures, strongly oriented to applications in continuum mechanics of fluids. *. A thorough scrutiny of Young measures and their various generalization is in Chapter 3 from the perspective of

convex compactification Convex or convexity may refer to: Science and technology * Convex lens, in optics Mathematics * Convex set, containing the whole line segment that joins points ** Convex polygon, a polygon which encloses a convex set of points ** Convex polytope, ...

s. *. *. 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