This is the text of an expository talk given at the May 1997 Detroit meeting
of the American Mathematical Society. It is a tale of a famous football player
and a subtle problem he posed about the uniform convergence of Dirichlet
series. Hiding in the background is the theory of analytic functions of an
infinite number of variables

Boas, Harold P.

English

arXiv

The air buzzed with anticipation as the football team crowded excitedly into the lecture hall. The country’s top halfback was about to defend his Ph.D. thesis in mathematics! It soon became apparent that the proceedings were a mere formality, as the candidate’s dissertation on summability methods for divergent Dirichlet series was a masterful piece of work. This scenario is no fantasy from a 1990s television sitcom; it is a true story. The place was Copenhagen, the year was 1910, and the sport was “football ” as the word is understood internationally (“soccer ” in American lingo). The star halfback played in the 1908 Olympics on Denmark’s silver-medal football team, a team that is still in the record books [21, p. 172] for the most goals scored in a single game. (Denmark defeated France by the lopsided score of 17 to 1.) The dissertation title was Contributions to the Theory o

Harold P. Boas

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Harald Bohr The Football

http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.80.3941

The football player and the infinite series

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