Walter Kurt Hayman FRS (formerly Haymann; 6 January 1926 – 1 January 2020) was a British mathematician known for contributions to complex analysis.[1] He was a professor at Imperial College London.[2]

Walter Hayman
Born
Walter Kurt Hayman

(1926-01-06)6 January 1926
Cologne, Germany
Died1 January 2020(2020-01-01) (aged 93)
NationalityBritish
EducationUniversity of Cambridge
Known forTheory of subharmonic functions
Univalent function theory
SpouseMargaret Hayman (née Crann)
AwardsBerwick Prize (1955)
Senior Berwick Prize (1964)
De Morgan Medal (1995)
Scientific career
FieldsComplex analysis
InstitutionsKing's College, Newcastle
University of Exeter
Imperial College
Websitewww3.imperial.ac.uk/people/w.hayman

Life and work

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Hayman was born in Cologne, Germany, the son of Roman law professor Franz Haymann (1874-1947) and Ruth Therese Hensel, daughter of mathematician Kurt Hensel.[3] He was a great-grandson of acclaimed composer Fanny Mendelssohn. Because of his Jewish heritage, he left Germany, then under Nazi rule, alone by train in 1938. He continued his schooling at Gordonstoun School,[4] and later at St John's College, Cambridge under John Edensor Littlewood and his doctoral advisor Mary Cartwright. He taught at King's College, Newcastle, and the University of Exeter.[5]

In 1947, he married Margaret Riley Crann after they met at a Quaker meeting.[6] Together, they founded the British Mathematical Olympiad.[7] The pair had three daughters, including the peace activist Carolyn Hayman and the filmmaker Sheila Hayman.[8]

He is known for his asymptotic results in Bieberbach conjecture in 1955,[9] and for Hayman's alternatives in Nevanlinna Theory. His work with Wolfgang Fuchs gave a solution to an inverse problem of the Nevanlinna theory for entire functions, predating David Drasin's 1976 work.

Honours and awards

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Hayman was elected to the Royal Society in 1956 and of the Finnish Academy of Science and Letters in 1978:[10] he was elected "Foreign member" of the Accademia dei Lincei on 16 December 1985.[11] In 1992 he received an honorary doctorate from the Faculty of Mathematics and Science at Uppsala University, Sweden[12] In 1995 he was awarded the De Morgan Medal by the London Mathematical Society.[13] In 2008, an issue of the Journal Computational Methods and Function Theory was dedicated to him on the occasion of his 80th birthday.[14]

Selected publications

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Hayman presents a talk at the 2010 One Day Function Theory Meeting.

Papers

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  • Hayman, W. K. (1952), "Functions with values in a given domain", Proceedings of the American Mathematical Society, 3 (3): 428–432, doi:10.1090/S0002-9939-1952-0049323-9, MR 0049323, Zbl 0048.31402.
  • Hayman, W. K. (1974), "The local growth of power series: a survey of the Wiman-Valiron method", Canadian Mathematical Bulletin, 17 (3): 317–358, CiteSeerX 10.1.1.433.7629, doi:10.4153/CMB-1974-064-0, MR 0385095, Zbl 0314.30021.
  • Hayman, W. K.; Rossi, J. F. (1984), "Characteristic, maximum modulus and value distribution", Transactions of the American Mathematical Society, 284 (2): 651–664, doi:10.1090/S0002-9947-1984-0743737-2, MR 0743737, Zbl 0547.30023.
  • Hayman, Walter K. (1993), "A problem on Fourier series arising from an Isoperimetric inequality", in Ricci, Paolo Emilio (ed.), Problemi attuali dell'analisi e della fisica matematica. Atti del simposio internazionale dedicato a Gaetano Fichera nel suo 70o compleanno. Taormina, 15–17 ottobre 1992, Roma: Dipartimento di Matematica Università di Roma La Sapienza – Aracne Editrice, pp. 119–125, MR 1249093, Zbl 0851.42009.
  • Hayman, W. K. (2002), "Univalent and Multivalent Functions", in Kuhnau, Reiner (ed.), Geometric Function Theory, Handbook of Complex Analysis, vol. 1, Amsterdam: North-Holland, pp. 1–36, ISBN 978-0-444-82845-3, MR 1966188, Zbl 1069.30018.

Books

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Notes

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References

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Biographical references

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General references

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