ALBERT EDWARD INGHAM

(1900 -1967)

Albert Ingham won a scholarship to Trinity College Cambridge in December 1917 and an outstanding undergraduate career saw him win a Smith's prize and the highest honours. In 1922, he was elected to a fellowship at Trinity for a dissertation on the zeta function and his next four years were occupied only with research, a few months of which were spent at Göttingen. During this time Ingham was greatly influenced by John Edensor Littlewood who would give him the advice to "work at a hard problem: you may not solve it but you'll solve another one".

In 1926, Ingham was appointed to Leeds but 4 years later returned to Cambridge, on the death of Ramsey, and remained there for the rest of his life. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1945 and became a Reader in Mathematical Analysis in 1953. His book On the distribution of prime numbers published in 1932 was his only book and it is a classic. Many of the ideas here, as in other work of Ingham's, came from the joint work undertaken by Harald Bohr and Littlewood.

Ingham also worked on the Riemann zeta function, the theory of numbers, the theory of series and Tauberian theorems.

Additional information:

http://www-history.mcs.st-and.ac.uk/~history/Mathematicians/Ramsey.html

 

Photo courtesy of:

http://www-history.mcs.st-and.ac.uk/~history/Thumbnails/Ingham.jpg