Patrick Brendan Kennedy Explained

Patrick Brendan Kennedy
Birth Date:1929 7, df=yes
Birth Place:Clarecastle, County Clare, Ireland
Death Place:Nottingham, England
Mother:Kit O'Sullivan
Father:Pat Kennedy
Footnotes:Image used with permission of the ICU, found in: https://icu.ie/articles/50

Patrick Brendan Kennedy (20 July 1929 in Clarecastle, County Clare, Ireland - 8 June 1966 in Nottingham, England) was an Irish chess champion, and an academic in Mathematics, notable for his work in complex analysis.

Early life, family, and personal life

Kennedy was the third child of Pat Kennedy and Kit O'Sullivan, his father, a master carpenter by trade, decided instead to join the police force in 1923, many on his mother's side were blacksmiths near Castlemaine.[1] His parents moved to Ballylongford in 1936, and secured a transfer for Kennedy to attend the North Monastery secondary school in Cork.

Whilst at the North Monastery School, Kennedy won the Honan Scholarship to University College Cork, where in 1949 was awarded his Bachelor's degree in Mathematics and Mathematical Physics.[2] In the same year, Kennedy also took part in the Irish Chess Championship, and won 7 games out of 7, becoming the Irish chess Champion, he has been the only Irish Chess champion to win in such a way.[3] After this, Kennedy was described as having a falling off in the quality of his play, and lost his title at the 1950 Championship.

In 1951, Kennedy completed his Master's degree, and was recommended by his examiner V. C. A. Ferraro, who at the time was a professor of applied mathematics at the University College of the South West at Exeter, to study for a Ph.D. with Walter Hayman at Exeter.[4]

Kennedy's first paper was published in 1953, titled On a conjecture of Heins, which concerned a conjecture of Heins on subharmonic functions and gives positive results.[5] That same year he was appointed as an assistant lecturer in mathematics at the University of Aberystwyth, and by 1954 he was awarded a Ph.D. by the National University of Ireland for his thesis Asymptotic Values on Integral Functions.

He married Pamela Fishwick in March 1954, and had three children, David Patrick Kennedy, Anne Deirdre Kennedy, and Jane C Deborah Kennedy.

Since Kennedy lived in Wales at the time, he had wanted to avoid national service for the English, and so took a lecturer position at University College Cork in 1954, his objectives were to modernise courses and raise standards, and his research output increased. Hayman characterises Kennedy's attitude to academic politics as "black and white", and Kennedy wasn't afraid to work hard both in his research and on committee to achieve productive outcomes.

In 1956, he was appointed professor of mathematics at Cork, and awarded the D.Sc. by the National University of Ireland in 1960, he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Irish Academy in 1962. He was appointed the first professor of mathematics at the University of York in 1962, which planned to open the next year. He worked at building the mathematics library and appointed staff to the mathematics department.

Kennedy took his life in 1966 on the night of 8 June, the coroner explained it was a combination of a psychiatric illness and added pressure of work, with his wife, Fishwick stating: "[He] set himself too high a standard and drove himself too hard".[6]

List of academic works

Hayman, a prominent British Mathematician and colleague of Kennedy, describes Kennedy's work as "extremely successful in all three fields in which he wrote. Kennedy collaborated with several of his peers in his papers, and was capable of constructing examples to his own and others results that were "simple although far from obvious". Kennedy's work can be broken into three fields:

Theory of functions of a complex variable

Fourier series

Tauberian theorems

Notes and References

  1. Hayman . W. K. . 1967 . Patrick Brendan Kennedy . Journal of the London Mathematical Society . en . s1-42 . 1 . 559–568 . 10.1112/jlms/s1-42.1.559.
  2. Web site: Paddy Kennedy - Biography . 2022-06-28 . Maths History . en.
  3. Web site: Paddy Kennedy . 2022-06-28 . www.icu.ie.
  4. Grabiner . Judy . 2002 . Creators of Mathematics: The Irish Connection, edited by Ken Houston . Irish Mathematical Society Bulletin . 0048 . 65–68 . 10.33232/bims.0048.65.68 . 0791-5578. free .
  5. Kennedy . P. B. . 1955 . On a Conjecture of Heins . Proceedings of the London Mathematical Society . en . s3-5 . 1 . 22–47 . 10.1112/plms/s3-5.1.22.
  6. News: 1966-06-15 . Man took own life . 9 . Nottingham Evening Post . 2022-06-29.
  7. Kennedy . P. B. . 1956 . Conformal Mapping of Bounded Domains . Journal of the London Mathematical Society . s1-31 . 3 . 332–336 . 10.1112/jlms/s1-31.3.332 . 0024-6107.
  8. Kennedy . P. B. . 1956 . A Class of Integral Functions Bounded on Certain Curves . Proceedings of the London Mathematical Society . s3-6 . 4 . 518–547 . 10.1112/plms/s3-6.4.518 . 0024-6115.
  9. Hayman . W. K. . Kennedy . P. B. . 1958 . On the Growth of Multivalent Functions . Journal of the London Mathematical Society . s1-33 . 3 . 333–341 . 10.1112/jlms/s1-33.3.333 . 0024-6107.
  10. Kennedy . P. B. . 1959 . On a Theorem of Hayman Concerning Quasi-Bounded Functions . Canadian Journal of Mathematics . 11 . 593–600 . 10.4153/cjm-1959-054-0 . 125004559 . 0008-414X. free .
  11. Cartwright . M. . 1984 . Bounded Conjugacy Conditions . Irish Mathematical Society Bulletin . 0012 . 14–21 . 10.33232/bims.0012.14.21 . 0791-5578. free .
  12. Kennedy . P. B. . 1964 . A problem on bounded analytic functions . Proceedings of the American Mathematical Society . 15 . 2 . 325–326 . 10.1090/s0002-9939-1964-0161978-5 . 120308932 . 0002-9939. free .
  13. KENNEDY . P. B. . On the Derivative of a Function of Bounded Characteristic . 1964 . The Quarterly Journal of Mathematics . 15 . 1 . 337–341 . 10.1093/qmath/15.1.337 . 0033-5606.
  14. Holland . F. . Twomey . J. B. . 1973 . On coefficient means of certain subclasses of univalent functions . Transactions of the American Mathematical Society . en . 185 . 151–163 . 10.1090/S0002-9947-1973-0328054-X . 0002-9947. free .
  15. KENNEDY . P. B. . Fourier Series with Gaps . 1956 . The Quarterly Journal of Mathematics . 7 . 1 . 224–230 . 10.1093/qmath/7.1.224 . 0033-5606.
  16. KENNEDY . P. B. . Fourier Series with Gaps (Ii) . 1957 . The Quarterly Journal of Mathematics . 8 . 1 . 84–88 . 10.1093/qmath/8.1.84 . 0033-5606.
  17. Kennedy . P. B. . 1958 . Remark on a Theorem of Zygmund . Journal of the London Mathematical Society . s1-33 . 1 . 71–72 . 10.1112/jlms/s1-33.1.71 . 0024-6107.
  18. Kennedy . P. B. . 1958 . On the Coefficients in Certain Fourier Series . Journal of the London Mathematical Society . s1-33 . 2 . 196–207 . 10.1112/jlms/s1-33.2.196 . 2027/mdp.39015095252543 . 0024-6107. free .
  19. Kennedy . P. B. . 1959 . A remark on continuity conditions . Proceedings of the American Mathematical Society . 10 . 2 . 203–204 . 10.1090/s0002-9939-1959-0103951-7 . 0002-9939. free .
  20. Kennedy . P. B. . 1964 . Note on Fourier Series with Hadamard Gaps . Journal of the London Mathematical Society . s1-39 . 1 . 115–116 . 10.1112/jlms/s1-39.1.115 . 0024-6107.
  21. KENNEDY . P. B. . Integrability Theorems for Power Series . 1955 . The Quarterly Journal of Mathematics . 6 . 1 . 316–320 . 10.1093/qmath/6.1.316 . 0033-5606.
  22. KENNEDY . P. B. . A Note on Uniformly Distributed Sequences . 1956-01-01 . The Quarterly Journal of Mathematics . 7 . 1 . 125–127 . 10.1093/qmath/7.1.125 . 0033-5606.
  23. Kennedy . P. B. . 1957 . General Integrability Theorems for Power Series . Journal of the London Mathematical Society . s1-32 . 1 . 58–62 . 10.1112/jlms/s1-32.1.58 . 0024-6107.
  24. Kennedy . P. B. . Szüsz . P. . 1966 . On a bounded increasing power series . Proceedings of the American Mathematical Society . 17 . 3 . 580–581 . 10.1090/s0002-9939-1966-0201616-8 . 0002-9939. free .
  25. Kennedy . P. B. . 1966 . On a theorem of Szüsz . Acta Mathematica Academiae Scientiarum Hungaricae . 17 . 3–4 . 423–424 . 10.1007/bf01894886 . 122558009 . 0001-5954.

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