John Edensor Littlewood

Work

Most of Littlewood's work was in the field of mathematical analysis. He began research under the supervision of Ernest William Barnes, who suggested that he attempt to prove the Riemann hypothesis: Littlewood showed that if the Riemann hypothesis is true, then the prime number theorem follows and obtained the error term. This work won him his Trinity fellowship. However, the link between the Riemann hypothesis and the prime number theorem had been known before in Continental Europe, and Littlewood wrote later in his book, A Mathematician's Miscellany that his rediscovery of the result did not shed a positive light on the isolated nature of British mathematics at the time.

Theory of the distribution of prime numbers

In 1914, Littlewood published his first result in the field of analytic number theory concerning the error term of the prime-counting function. If ${\displaystyle \pi (x)}$ denotes the number of primes up ${\displaystyle x}$, then the prime number theorem implies that ${\displaystyle \pi (x)\sim \mathrm{Li}(x)}$, where ${\displaystyle \mathrm{Li}(x)}$ is the offset logarithmic integral. Numerical evidence seemed to suggest that ${\displaystyle \pi (x)<\mathrm{Li}(x)}$ for all ${\displaystyle x}$. Littlewood, however proved that the difference ${\displaystyle \pi (x)-\mathrm{Li}(x)}$ changes sign infinitely often.

Collaboration with G. H. Hardy

Littlewood collaborated for many years with G. H. Hardy. Together they devised the first Hardy–Littlewood conjecture, a strong form of the twin prime conjecture, and the second Hardy–Littlewood conjecture.

Ramanujan

He also, with Hardy, identified the work of the Indian mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan as that of a genius and supported him in travelling from India to work at Cambridge. A self-taught mathematician, Ramanujan later became a Fellow of the Royal Society, Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, and widely recognised as on a par with other geniuses such as Euler and Jacobi.

Collaboration with Mary Cartwright

In the late 1930s, as the prospect of war loomed, the Department of Scientific and Industrial Research sought the interest of pure mathematicians in the properties of non linear differential equations that were needed by radio engineers and scientists. The problems appealed to Littlewood and Mary Cartwright, and they worked on them independently during the next 20 years.

The problems that Littlewood and Cartwright worked on concerned differential equations arising out of early research on radar: their work foreshadowed the modern theory of dynamical systems. Littlewood's 4/3 inequality on bilinear forms was a forerunner of the later Grothendieck tensor norm theory.

Military service WWI – ballistics work

During the Great War, Littlewood served in the Royal Garrison Artillery as a second lieutenant. He made highly significant contributions in the field of ballistics.

Later life

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

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

Among his PhD students were Sarvadaman Chowla, Harold Davenport, and Donald C. Spencer. Spencer reported that in 1941 when he (Spencer) was about to get on the boat that would take him home to the United States, Littlewood reminded him: "n, n alpha, n beta!" (referring to Littlewood's conjecture).

Littlewood's collaborative work, carried out by correspondence, covered fields in Diophantine approximation and Waring's problem, in particular. In his other work, he collaborated with Raymond Paley on Littlewood–Paley theory in Fourier theory, and with Cyril Offord in combinatorial work on random sums, in developments that opened up fields that are still intensively studied.

In a 1947 lecture, the Danish mathematician Harald Bohr said, "To illustrate to what extent Hardy and Littlewood in the course of the years came to be considered as the leaders of recent English mathematical research, I may report what an excellent colleague once jokingly said: 'Nowadays, there are only three really great English mathematicians: Hardy, Littlewood, and Hardy–Littlewood.' "

The German mathematician Edmund Landau supposed that Littlewood was a pseudonym that Hardy used for his lesser work and "so doubted the existence of Littlewood that he made a special trip to Great Britain to see the man with his own eyes". He visited Cambridge where he saw much of Hardy but nothing of Littlewood and so considered his conjecture to be proven. A similar story was told about Norbert Wiener, who vehemently denied it in his autobiography.

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

Cultural references

John Littlewood is depicted in two films covering the life of Ramanujan – Ramanujan in 2014 portrayed by Michael Lieber and The Man Who Knew Infinity in 2015 portrayed by Toby Jones.