Book Description

These two volumes contain all the papers published by Hans Rademacher, either alone or as joint author, essentially in chronological order. Included also are a collection of published abstracts, a number of papers that appeared in institutes and seminars but are only now being formally published, and several problems posed and/or solved by Rademacher. The editor has provided notes for each paper, offering comments and making corrections. He has also contributed a biographical sketch. The earlier papers are on real variables, measurability, convergence factors, and Euler summability of series. This phase of Rademacher's work culminates in a paper of 1922, in which he introduced the systems of orthogonal functions now known as the Rademacher functions. After this, a new period in Rademacher's career began, and his major effort was devoted to the theory of functions of a complex variable and number theory. Some of his most important contributions were made in these fields. He perfected the sieve method and used it skillfully in the study of algebraic number fields; he studied the additive prime number theory of these fields; he generalized Goldbach's Problem; and he began his work on the theory of the Riemann zeta function, modular functions, and Dedekind sums (now often&-and justly&-called Dedekind-Rademacher sums). To this period also becomes what has become known as the Rademacher-Brauer formula. Rademacher came to the United States as a refugee in 1934. In the years that followed, he obtained some of his most important results in connection with the Fourier coefficients of modular forms of positive dimensions. His general method may be considered a modification and improvement of the Hardy-Ramanujan-Littlewood circle method. He also published additional papers on Dedekind-Rademacher sums (with A. Whiteman), general number theory (with H. S. Zuckerman), and modular functions (also with Zuckerman). During the last decade of his life&-the 1960s&-he continued his work on these problems and devoted considerable attention to general analysis&-especially harmonic analysis&-and to analytic number theory. All of the papers in Volume I and ten of those in Volume II are in German. One paper is in Hungarian. The volumes are part of the MIT Press series Mathematicians of Our Time (Gian-Carlo Rota, general editor).