Harold Davenport

Harold Davenport FRS After professorial positions at the University of Wales and University College London, he was appointed to the Rouse Ball Chair of Mathematics in Cambridge in 1958. There he remained until his death, of lung cancer.

Personal life Davenport married Anne Lofthouse, whom he met at the University College of North Wales at Bangor in 1944; they had two children, Richard and James, the latter going on to become Hebron and Medlock Professor of Information Technology at the University of Bath.

Influence

From about 1950, Davenport was the obvious leader of a "school", somewhat unusually in the context of British mathematics. The successor to the school of mathematical analysis of G. H. Hardy and J. E. Littlewood, it was also more narrowly devoted to number theory, and indeed to its analytic side, as had flourished in the 1930s. This implied problem-solving, and hard-analysis methods. The outstanding works of Klaus Roth and Alan Baker exemplify what this can do, in diophantine approximation. Two reported sayings, "the problems are there", and "I don't care how you get hold of the gadget, I just want to know how big or small it is", sum up the attitude, and could be transplanted today into any discussion of combinatorics. This concrete emphasis on problems stood in sharp contrast with the abstraction of Bourbaki, who were then active just across the English Channel.

Books The Higher Arithmetic: An Introduction to the Theory of Numbers (1952) Analytic methods for Diophantine equations and Diophantine inequalities (1962); Multiplicative number theory (1967) 2nd edition (revised by Hugh L. Montgomery) The collected works of Harold Davenport (1977) in four volumes, edited by B. J. Birch, H. Halberstam, C. A. Rogers