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
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.
[.] 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 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
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See also
*Bounded variation
In mathematical analysis, a function of bounded variation, also known as ' function, is a real-valued function whose total variation is bounded (finite): the graph of a function having this property is well behaved in a precise sense. For a conti ...
* Caccioppoli set
*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 ...
*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 ...
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