Nathan Fine

Who was Nathan Fine?

Nathan Jacob Fine was a mathematician who worked on basic hypergeometric series. He is best known for his lecture notes on the subject which for four decades served as an inspiration to experts in the field until they were finally published as a book. He solved the Jeep problem in 1946.

Nathan Fine retired in 1978 as a professor at Pennsylvania State University. Prior to that he worked as a faculty at the University of Pennsylvania and Cornell University. For a brief period he also worked at the Operations Evaluation Group, affiliated with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Beside the book he published about 40 papers in several fields of mathematics.

Nathan Fine received his Ph.D. in 1946 from University of Pennsylvania, where he was a student of Antoni Zygmund. Fine's doctoral students include J. J. Price.

He wrote the book Basic Hypergeometric Series and Applications ISBN 0-8218-1524-5.