Axehole

It’s Mathematics Awareness Month, so we’re going to bring to your attention the recent awarding of the Abel Prize, the Nobel prize of math, to Swedish mathematician Lennart Carleson.

Announcing the 2006 award on 23 March, Norwegian Academy President Ole Didrik Laerum cited Lennart “for his profound and seminal contribution to harmonic analysis and the theory of smooth dynamical systems.”
The result for which Lennart is most widely known is his completion of the work on wave analysis begun by Jean Baptiste Joseph Fourier (1768-1830). Fourier showed how to take the graph of a wave, such as a sound wave or heat radiation, and decompose it into an infinite sum of sine waves.

Fourier’s approach worked for all of the naturally occurring waves that people looked at, but would it work for all waves? Or were there some strange pathological waves that could not be expressed as an infinite sum of sine waves? That question remained open for many years until Carleson answered it in 1966, showing that the Fourier decomposition process does indeed work for all waves.

Lennart will receive his prize from Queen Sonja of Norway at a ceremony in Oslo on 23 May.

via MAA