Johannes van der Corput

Who was Johannes van der Corput?

Johannes Gualtherus van der Corput was a Dutch mathematician, working in the field of analytic number theory.

He was appointed professor at the University of Fribourg in 1922, at the University of Groningen in 1923, and at the University of Amsterdam in 1946. He was one of the founders of the Mathematisch Centrum in Amsterdam, of which he also was the first director. From 1953 on he worked in the United States at the University of California, Berkeley, and the University of Wisconsin–Madison.

Among his students were Jurjen Koksma and Jan Popken. His Erdős number is 2.

He introduced the Van der Corput lemma, a technique for creating an upper bound on the measure of a set drawn from harmonic analysis, and the Van der Corput theorem on equidistribution modulo 1.