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Concept
Jan Arnoldus Schouten
Summary
Jan Arnoldus Schouten (28 August 1883 – 20 January 1971) was a Dutch mathematician and Professor at the Delft University of Technology. He was an important contributor to the development of tensor calculus and Ricci calculus, and was one of the founders of the Mathematisch Centrum in Amsterdam.
Schouten was born in Nieuwer-Amstel to a family of eminent shipping magnates. He attended a Hogere Burger School, and later he took up studies in electrical engineering at the Delft Polytechnical School. After graduating in 1908, he worked for Siemens in Berlin and for a public utility in Rotterdam before returning to study mathematics in Delft in 1912. During his study he had become fascinated by the power and subtleties of vector analysis. After a short while in industry, he returned to Delft to study Mathematics, where he received his Ph.D. degree in 1914 under supervision of Jacob Cardinaal with a thesis entitled Grundlagen der Vektor- und Affinoranalysis.
Schouten was an effective university administrator and leader of mathematical societies. During his tenure as professor and as institute head he was involved in various controversies with the topologist and intuitionist mathematician L. E. J. Brouwer. He was a shrewd investor as well as mathematician and successfully managed the budget of the institute and Dutch mathematical society. He hosted the International Congress of Mathematicians in Amsterdam in early 1954, and gave the opening address. Schouten was one of the founders of the Mathematisch Centrum in Amsterdam.
Among his PhD candidates students were Johanna Manders (1919), Dirk Struik (1922), Johannes Haantjes (1933), Wouter van der Kulk (1945), and Albert Nijenhuis (1952).
In 1933 Schouten became member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Schouten died in 1971 in Epe. His son Jan Frederik Schouten (1910-1980) was Professor at the Eindhoven University of Technology from 1958 to 1978.
Schouten's dissertation applied his "direct analysis", modeled on the vector analysis of Josiah Willard Gibbs and Oliver Heaviside, to higher order tensor-like entities he called affinors.
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