Edwin Hewitt was an American

United States

The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...

 mathematician

Mathematician

A mathematician is a person whose primary area of study is the field of mathematics. Mathematicians are concerned with quantity, structure, space, and change....

 known for his work in abstract harmonic analysis

Harmonic analysis

Harmonic analysis is the branch of mathematics that studies the representation of functions or signals as the superposition of basic waves. It investigates and generalizes the notions of Fourier series and Fourier transforms...

 and for his discovery, in collaboration with Leonard Jimmie Savage

Leonard Jimmie Savage

Leonard Jimmie Savage was an American mathematician and statistician. Nobel Prize-winning economist Milton Friedman said Savage was "one of the few people I have met whom I would unhesitatingly call a genius."...

, of the Hewitt–Savage zero-one law.

He received his Ph.D. in 1942 from Harvard University

Harvard University

Harvard University is a private Ivy League university located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States, established in 1636 by the Massachusetts legislature. Harvard is the oldest institution of higher learning in the United States and the first corporation chartered in the country...

, and served on the faculty of mathematics at the University of Washington

University of Washington

University of Washington is a public research university, founded in 1861 in Seattle, Washington, United States. The UW is the largest university in the Northwest and the oldest public university on the West Coast. The university has three campuses, with its largest campus in the University...

 from 1954.

Hewitt pioneered the construction of the hyperreals

Hyperreal number

The system of hyperreal numbers represents a rigorous method of treating the infinite and infinitesimal quantities. The hyperreals, or nonstandard reals, *R, are an extension of the real numbers R that contains numbers greater than anything of the form1 + 1 + \cdots + 1. \, Such a number is...

 by means of an ultrapower construction (Hewitt, 1948).

Hewitt wrote the 1975 English

English language

English is a West Germanic language that arose in the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of England and spread into what was to become south-east Scotland under the influence of the Anglian medieval kingdom of Northumbria...

 translation of A. A. Kirillov's

Alexandre Kirillov

Alexandre Aleksandrovich Kirillov is a Soviet and Russian mathematician, renowned for his works in the fields of representation theory, topological groups and Lie groups. In particular he introduced the orbit method into representation theory....

 1972 Russian

Russian language

Russian is a Slavic language used primarily in Russia, Belarus, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan. It is an unofficial but widely spoken language in Ukraine, Moldova, Latvia, Turkmenistan and Estonia and, to a lesser extent, the other countries that were once constituent republics...

 monograph

Monograph

A monograph is a work of writing upon a single subject, usually by a single author.It is often a scholarly essay or learned treatise, and may be released in the manner of a book or journal article. It is by definition a single document that forms a complete text in itself...

Elements of the Theory of Representations (Элементы Теории Представлений).

Also, along with Kenneth A. Ross, Hewitt wrote "Abstract Harmonic Analysis" in 1963, an extensive work in two volumes.

External links