Edwin Hewitt (January 20, 1920,
Everett, Washington
Everett (; ) is the county seat and most populous city of Snohomish County, Washington, United States. It is north of Seattle and is one of the main cities in the Seattle metropolitan area, metropolitan area and the Puget Sound region. Everett ...
– June 21, 1999) was an American
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, mathematical structure, structure, space, Mathematica ...
known for his work in abstract
harmonic analysis
Harmonic analysis is a branch of mathematics concerned with investigating the connections between a function and its representation in frequency. The frequency representation is found by using the Fourier transform for functions on unbounded do ...
and for his discovery, in collaboration with
Leonard Jimmie Savage
Leonard Jimmie Savage (born Leonard Ogashevitz; 1917 – 1971) was an American mathematician and statistician. Economist Milton Friedman said Savage was "one of the few people I have met whom I would unhesitatingly call a genius."
Education and ...
, of the
Hewitt–Savage zero–one law.
He received his Ph.D. in 1942 from
Harvard University
Harvard University is a Private university, private Ivy League research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States. Founded in 1636 and named for its first benefactor, the History of the Puritans in North America, Puritan clergyma ...
, and served on the faculty of mathematics at the
University of Washington
The University of Washington (UW and informally U-Dub or U Dub) is a public research university in Seattle, Washington, United States. Founded in 1861, the University of Washington is one of the oldest universities on the West Coast of the Uni ...
from 1954.
Hewitt pioneered the construction of the
hyperreals
In mathematics, hyperreal numbers are an extension of the real numbers to include certain classes of infinite and infinitesimal numbers. A hyperreal number x is said to be finite if, and only if, , x, for some integer by means of an
ultrapower
The ultraproduct is a mathematical construction that appears mainly in abstract algebra and mathematical logic, in particular in model theory and set theory. An ultraproduct is a quotient of the direct product of a family of structures. All fact ...
construction (Hewitt, 1948).
Hewitt wrote the 1975 English translation of
A. A. Kirillov's 1972 Russian
monograph
A monograph is generally a long-form work on one (usually scholarly) subject, or one aspect of a subject, typically created by a single author or artist (or, sometimes, by two or more authors). Traditionally it is in written form and published a ...
''Elements of the Theory of Representations'' (Элементы Теории Представлений), and co-authored ''Abstract Harmonic Analysis'' with
Kenneth A. Ross (1st edn., 1st vol. in 1963; 1st edn., 2nd vol. in 1970), an extensive work in two volumes.
See also
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Cohen–Hewitt factorization theorem
Publications
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References
Edwin Hewitt's work in analysis ''in'' Topological Commentary 4 (2)
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External links
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by mathematician Walter Schempp
American probability theorists
1920 births
1999 deaths
20th-century American mathematicians
American mathematical analysts
Harvard University alumni
University of Washington faculty
People from Everett, Washington
{{US-mathematician-stub