John Edensor Littlewood

John Edensor Littlewood (June 9 1885 – September 6 1977) was a British mathematician.

Littlewood was born in Rochester in Kent. He went to St Paul's School in London, where he was taught by F. S. Macaulay, now known for his contributions to ideal theory. He studied at the University of Cambridge. He was the Senior Wrangler in the Mathematical Tripos.

Most of his work was in the field of mathematical analysis. He began research under the supervision of Ernest William Barnes, working on entire functions. Among his own PhD students were Sarvadaman Chowla, Harold Davenport and Donald C. Spencer.

His collaborative work, carried out by correspondence, covered fields in Diophantine approximation and Waring's problem, in particular. In his other work Littlewood collaborated with Raymond Paley in Fourier theory, and with Offord in combinatorial work on random sums, in developments that opened up fields still intensively studied. Littlewood's inequality on bilinear forms was a forerunner of the later Grothendieck tensor norm theory.

He coined Littlewood's law, which states that individuals can expect miracles to happen to them, at the rate of about one per month.

He continued to write papers into his eighties, particularly in analytical areas of what would become the theory of dynamical systems.

He is also remembered for his book of reminiscences, A Mathematician's Miscellany (new edition published in 1986).

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