Donald J. Newman

Donald J. (D. J.) Newman (July 27, 1930 – March 28, 2007) was an American mathematician and professor, excelling at the Putnam mathematics competition while an undergraduate at City College of New York and New York University, and later receiving his PhD from Harvard University in 1953.^[2]

Life and works[]

Newman was born in Brooklyn, New York in 1930, and studied at New York's Stuyvesant High School.^[3] When he was 14 he worked with Dubble Bubble Gum to help solve the statistical question of how often a gum purchaser would receive the same joke for their gum wrapper.^[4] He was an avid problem-solver, and as an undergraduate was a Putnam Fellow all three years he took part in the Putnam math competition; only the third person to attain that feat.^[5] His mathematical specialties included complex analysis, approximation theory and number theory. In 1980 he found a short proof of the prime number theorem, which can now be found in his textbook on Complex analysis.^[6]

Newman was a friend and associate of John Nash.^{[7]:144–145}​ His career included posts as a Professor of Mathematics at MIT, Brown University, Yeshiva University, Temple University and a distinguished chair at Bar Ilan University in Israel.^[8] He held government and industry positions at Avco, Republic Aviation, Bell Laboratories, IBM and the NSA.^{[citation needed]}

Newman's love of problem solving comes through in his writing; his published output as a mathematician includes 150 papers and five books. He taught numerous students over the years, including , , , , , Shmuel Weinberger, and at Yeshiva University, and Bo Gao, , , and Yuan Xu at Temple University.

See also[]

• A Beautiful Mind (book)

Selected publications[]

• Newman, Donald J. (1960). "A simplified proof of Waring's conjecture". Michigan Mathematical Journal. 7 (3): 291–295. doi:10.1307/mmj/1028998439.
• Newman, Donald J. (1975). "A simple proof of Wiener's ${\displaystyle 1/f}$ theorem". Proceedings of the American Mathematical Society. 48 (1): 264–265. doi:10.2307/2040730. JSTOR 2040730. MR 0365002.
• --. (1979) Approximation with rational functions. Providence, RI: Conference Board of the Mathematical Sciences by the American Mathematical Society. ISBN 0-8218-1691-8.
• Newman, Donald J. (1980). "Simple analytic proof of the prime number theorem" (PDF). American Mathematical Monthly. 87 (9): 693–696. doi:10.2307/2321853. JSTOR 2321853. MR 0602825.
• --. (1982) A problem seminar. New York: Springer. ISBN 0-387-90765-3.
• --. (1998) Analytic number theory. New York: Springer. ISBN 0-387-98308-2 (#177 in the Graduate Texts in Mathematics series).
• (1996) Complex Analysis. (2004 update w/ )
• with Robert P. Feinerman: (1974) Polynomial approximation. Baltimore: Williams & Wilkins. ISBN 0-6830-3077-9.^[9]

Papers and monographs[]

• The Hexagon Theorem (1982 [1])
• Finite type functions as limits of exponential sums (1974, MRC technical summary report)
• Splines and the logarithmic function (1974, MRC)
• Thought Less Mathematics, an essay on why branching thinking and similar solutions aren't central to mathematics and may even obscure deeper ideas

References[]

External links[]

• Donald J. Newman at the Mathematics Genealogy Project