Peter Michael Neumann

OBE The Most Excellent Order of the British Empire is a British order of chivalry, rewarding contributions to the arts and sciences, work with charitable and welfare organisations, and public service outside the civil service. It was established o ...

(28 December 1940 – 18 December 2020) was a British mathematician. His fields of interest included the

history of mathematics The history of mathematics deals with the origin of discoveries in mathematics and the mathematical methods and notation of the past. Before the modern age and the worldwide spread of knowledge, written examples of new mathematical developments ...

and

Galois theory In mathematics, Galois theory, originally introduced by Évariste Galois, provides a connection between field theory and group theory. This connection, the fundamental theorem of Galois theory, allows reducing certain problems in field theory t ...

Biography

Born in December 1940, Neumann was a son of the German-born mathematicians

Bernhard Neumann Bernhard Hermann Neumann (15 October 1909 – 21 October 2002) was a German-born British-Australian mathematician, who was a leader in the study of group theory. Early life and education After gaining a D.Phil. from Friedrich-Wilhelms Universi ...

and

Hanna Neumann Johanna (Hanna) Neumann (née von Caemmerer; 12 February 1914 – 14 November 1971) was a German-born mathematician who worked on group theory. Biography Neumann was born on 12 February 1914 in Lankwitz, Steglitz-Zehlendorf (today a distric ...

. He gained a BA degree from

The Queen's College, Oxford The Queen's College is a constituent college of the University of Oxford, England. The college was founded in 1341 by Robert de Eglesfield in honour of Philippa of Hainault. It is distinguished by its predominantly neoclassical architecture, ...

in 1963, and a

DPhil 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 a ...

degree from the

University of Oxford The University of Oxford is a collegiate research university in Oxford, England. There is evidence of teaching as early as 1096, making it the oldest university in the English-speaking world and the world's second-oldest university in contin ...

in 1966. Neumann was a Tutorial Fellow at the Queen's College, Oxford, and a lecturer at the

. His research work was in the field of

group theory In abstract algebra, group theory studies the algebraic structures known as group (mathematics), groups. The concept of a group is central to abstract algebra: other well-known algebraic structures, such as ring (mathematics), rings, field ...

. In 1987, Neumann won the Lester R. Ford Award of the Mathematical Association of America for his review of Harold Edwards' book ''Galois Theory''. He was the first Chairman of the

United Kingdom Mathematics Trust The United Kingdom Mathematics Trust (UKMT) is a charity founded in 1996 to help with the education of children in mathematics within the UK. History The national mathematics competitions existed prior to the formation of the UKMT, but t ...

, from October 1996 to April 2004, succeeded by

Bernard Silverman Sir Bernard Walter Silverman, (born 22 February 1952) is a British statistician and former Anglican clergyman. He was Master of St Peter's College, Oxford, from 1 October 2003 to 31 December 2009. He is a member of the Statistics Department ...

. Neumann showed in 1997 that

Alhazen's problem Alhazen's problem, also known as Alhazen's billiard problem, is a mathematical problem in geometrical optics first formulated by Ptolemy in 150 AD. It is named for the 11th-century Arab mathematician Alhazen (''Ibn al-Haytham'') who presented a ...

(reflecting a light ray off a spherical mirror to hit a target) cannot be solved with a

straightedge and compass construction In geometry, straightedge-and-compass construction – also known as ruler-and-compass construction, Euclidean construction, or classical construction – is the construction of lengths, angles, and other geometric figures using only an ideali ...

. Although the solution is a straightforward application of

it settles the constructibility of one of the last remaining geometric construction problems posed in antiquity. In 2003, the

London Mathematical Society The London Mathematical Society (LMS) is one of the United Kingdom's learned societies for mathematics (the others being the Royal Statistical Society (RSS), the Institute of Mathematics and its Applications (IMA), the Edinburgh Mathematical S ...

awarded him the

Senior Whitehead Prize The Senior Whitehead Prize of the London Mathematical Society (LMS) is now awarded in odd numbered years in memory of John Henry Constantine Whitehead, president of the LMS between 1953 and 1955. The Prize is awarded to mathematicians normally ...

. He was appointed

Officer of the Order of the British Empire The Most Excellent Order of the British Empire is a British order of chivalry, rewarding contributions to the arts and sciences, work with charitable and welfare organisations, and public service outside the civil service. It was established o ...

(OBE) in the

2008 New Year Honours The New Year Honours 2008 for the Commonwealth realms were announced on 29 December 2007, to celebrate the year passed and mark the beginning of 2008. The recipients of honours are displayed here as they were styled before their new honour, and ...

. After retiring in 2008, he became an Emeritus Fellow at the Queen's College. Neumann's work in the

includes his 2011 publication ''The Mathematical Writings of Evariste Galois'', an English language book on the work of French mathematician

Évariste Galois Évariste Galois (; ; 25 October 1811 – 31 May 1832) was a French mathematician and political activist. While still in his teens, he was able to determine a necessary and sufficient condition for a polynomial to be solvable by radicals, ...

(1811–1832). Neumann was a long-standing supporter of the

British Society for the History of Mathematics The British Society for the History of Mathematics (BSHM) was founded in 1971 to promote research into the history of mathematics at all levels and to further the use of the history of mathematics in education. The BSHM is concerned with all peri ...

, whose Neumann Prize is named in his honour. Neumann was the president of the

Mathematical Association The Mathematical Association is a professional society concerned with mathematics education in the UK. History It was founded in 1871 as the Association for the Improvement of Geometrical Teaching and renamed to the Mathematical Association in ...

from 2015 to 2016. Neumann died from

COVID-19 Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) is a contagious disease caused by a virus, the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2). The first known case was identified in Wuhan, China, in December 2019. The disease quickl ...

on 18 December 2020, ten days before his 80th birthday, during the COVID-19 pandemic in the United Kingdom.

Personal life

Neumann married Sylvia Bull in 1962. She was a fellow mathematics undergraduate at Oxford, where they met.

References

External links

Home page
at the Mathematical Institute, Oxford
Home page
at

* {{DEFAULTSORT:Neumann, Peter M. 1940 births 2020 deaths Deaths from the COVID-19 pandemic in England People from Oxford Alumni of The Queen's College, Oxford 20th-century English mathematicians 21st-century English mathematicians Group theorists British historians of mathematics Fellows of The Queen's College, Oxford Officers of the Order of the British Empire David Crighton medalists English male writers English people of German descent English people of German-Jewish descent