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William Osgood entered Harvard College in 1882, graduating in 1886. At first he studied classics but Benjamin Osgood Peirce, a mathematical physicist, and F N Cole persuaded him to study mathematics. Osgood undertook graduate work at Harvard for a year.
Cole had attended Klein's lectures at Harvard in 1885-87 on function theory and he persuaded Osgood to go to Göttingen in 1887 and study with Klein. Osgood did this and also undertook graduate work at Erlangen in 1889. His thesis was based on work of Klein and Max Noether on Abelian integrals. After being awarded a doctorate by Erlangen in 1890, he returned to Harvard where he taught until he retired.
Osgood's main work was on the convergence of sequences of continuous functions, solutions of differential equations, the calculus of variations and space filling curves. His Lehrbuch der Funktionentheorie (1907) became a classic.
After he retired from Harvard, Osgood taught for two years in Peking.
He is important in bringing the latest ideas of mathematical research to the USA. A kindly but reserved man, he liked to travel by car, smoking cigars and playing tennis and golf.
Texto original por: J J O'Connor and E F Robertson
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| List of References (6 books/articles) | Some Quotations (2)
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| Mathematicians born in the same country
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| Honours awarded to William F
Osgood (Click a link below for the full list of mathematicians honoured in this way) | |
| American Maths Society President | 1905 - 1906 |
| AMS Colloquium Lecturer | 1898 and 1913 |
| JOC/EFR December 1996 | School of
Mathematics and Statistics University of St Andrews, Scotland | 
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| The URL of this page
is: http://www-history.mcs.st-andrews.ac.uk/history/Mathematicians/Osgood.htm | ||