Arne Carl-August Beurling

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Born: 3 Feb 1905 in Gothenburg, Sweden
Died: 20 Nov 1986 in USA

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Beurling studied at Uppsala and obtained a doctorate there in 1933. He taught at Uppsala from 1932 to 1952 becoming professor of mathematics there.

During the session 1948-49 Beurling was a visiting professor at Harvard in the USA.

In 1954 he emigrated to the USA and became a professor at the Institute of Advanced Studies at Princeton.

Beurling worked on the theory of generalized functions, differential equations, harmonic analysis, Dirichlet series and potential theory. The concepts of energy and the Dirichlet integral took Beurling to a global axiomatic theory called the theory of Dirichlet spaces for complex functions.

During World War II, Beurling worked on cracking the German codes. Many other top mathematicians did similar work but details are still hard to obtain. Kjellberg writes in [3]:-

Beurling was one of the most charming persons you could meet. He had a very strong feeling for justice and fair play. During world war II he decoded in 2 weeks (in summer 1940) the German G-Schreiber message code, so all German troop movements were known to the Swedish command.