Mathwar/Personlist/Synge John
John Synge
(* March 23rd 1897, † March 30th 1995)
Life
Synge was born 1897 in Dublin, Ireland, in a Protestant family and educated at St. Andrew's College, Dublin. He entered Trinity College, Dublin in 1915. He won a Foundation Scholarship in his first year, which was quite remarkable because it was normally won by third year students. While an undergraduate he spotted a non-trivial error in a leading textbook in advanced mathematical analysis, written by E. T. Whittaker, and notified Whittaker of the error.[1] In 1919 he was awarded an M.A. in both Mathematics and Experimental Physics, and also a gold medal for outstanding merit.
He spent some of 1939 at Princeton University, and in 1941, he was a visiting professor at Brown University. In 1943 he was appointed as Chairman of the Mathematics Department of Ohio State University. Three years later he became Head of the Mathematics Department of the Carnegie Institute of Technology in Pittsburgh, where John Nash was one of his students. He spent a short time as a ballistic mathematician in the US Air Force between 1944 and 1945.
He returned to Ireland in 1948, accepting the position of Senior Professor in the School of Theoretical Physics at the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies. This school had been set up in 1940, and had several outstanding members, including Erwin Schrödinger (who contributed to quantum mechanics), who was also a Senior Professor.