Patrick Brendan Kennedy facts for kids

Quick facts for kids Patrick Brendan Kennedy
Photo of Patrick Kennedy in 1949 by an unknown photographer
Born	(1929-07-20)20 July 1929 Clarecastle, County Clare, Ireland
Died	20 June 1966(1966-06-20) (aged 36) Nottingham, England
Parents	Pat Kennedy (father) Kit O'Sullivan (mother)
Notes
Image used with permission of the ICU, found in: https://icu.ie/articles/50

Patrick Brendan Kennedy (born 20 July 1929 in Clarecastle, County Clare, Ireland – died 8 June 1966 in Nottingham, England) was a very talented Irish chess champion. He was also a brilliant mathematician who worked as a professor at universities. He was especially known for his studies in a field called complex analysis.

Patrick Kennedy's Early Life and Education

Patrick was the third child of Pat Kennedy and Kit O'Sullivan. His father, Pat, was a skilled carpenter. However, he decided to join the police force in 1923. Patrick's mother's family had many blacksmiths near Castlemaine.

In 1936, Patrick's parents moved to Ballylongford. They arranged for him to attend the North Monastery secondary school in Cork.

A Young Chess Champion!

While at the North Monastery School, Patrick won a special scholarship called the Honan Scholarship. This allowed him to study at University College Cork. In 1949, he earned his first university degree in Mathematics and Mathematical Physics.

That same year, Patrick also took part in the Irish Chess Championship. He played incredibly well, winning all 7 of his games! This made him the Irish Chess Champion. He is the only Irish Chess Champion to have won the title in such a perfect way. After this amazing win, some people felt his chess playing wasn't quite as strong, and he lost his title at the 1950 Championship.

Becoming a Mathematician

In 1951, Patrick finished his Master's degree. His examiner, V. C. A. Ferraro, suggested he study for a Ph.D. (a very high university degree) with a famous mathematician named Walter Hayman at the University of Exeter.

Patrick's first academic paper was published in 1953. It was called On a conjecture of Heins and was about subharmonic functions. In the same year, he became an assistant lecturer (a type of teacher) in mathematics at the University of Aberystwyth in Wales. By 1954, he earned his Ph.D. from the National University of Ireland. His Ph.D. paper was titled Asymptotic Values on Integral Functions.

In March 1954, Patrick married Pamela Fishwick. They had three children together: David, Anne, and Jane.

Patrick wanted to avoid national service (a type of military service) in England because he lived in Wales. So, in 1954, he took a lecturer job at University College Cork in Ireland. He aimed to make the courses better and raise the standards there. He also started doing more of his own research. Hayman said that Patrick had a very clear and strong view on how academic work should be done. Patrick was not afraid to work hard to get good results, both in his research and in university meetings.

In 1956, he became a professor of mathematics at Cork. In 1960, he earned another high degree, a D.Sc., from the National University of Ireland. He was also chosen to be a Fellow of the Royal Irish Academy in 1962.

Later in 1962, he became the first professor of mathematics at the University of York, which was planning to open the next year. He worked hard to build the mathematics library and hire staff for the new mathematics department.

Sadly, Patrick Kennedy passed away in 1966. The coroner (the person who investigates deaths) explained that it was due to a combination of a psychiatric illness and a lot of work pressure. His wife, Pamela, said that he "set himself too high a standard and drove himself too hard."

Patrick Kennedy's Academic Work

Hayman, a well-known British Mathematician and Patrick's colleague, said that Patrick's work was "extremely successful" in all the areas he wrote about. Patrick often worked with other mathematicians on his papers. He was very good at creating examples for his own and others' ideas that were "simple although far from obvious." Patrick's work can be divided into three main areas:

Theory of Functions of a Complex Variable

This area of mathematics deals with special kinds of numbers called complex numbers and how functions (like mathematical rules) behave with them.

• "On a conjecture of Heins"
• "Conformal mapping of bounded domains"
• "A class of integral functions bounded on certain curves"
• With W. K. Hayman, "On the growth of multivalent functions"
• "On a theorem of Hayman concerning quasibounded functions"
• "A property of bounded regular functions"
• "A problem on bounded analytic functions"
• "On the derivative of a function of bounded characteristic"
• With J. B. Twomey, "Some properties of bounded univalent functions and related classes of functions"

Fourier Series

Fourier series are a way to break down complicated waves or patterns into simpler waves. They are used in many fields, like signal processing and physics.

• "Fourier series with gaps"
• "Fourier series with gaps. II"
• "Remark on a theorem of Zygmund"
• "On the coefficients in certain Fourier series"
• "A remark on continuity conditions"
• "Note on Fourier series with Hadamard gaps"

Tauberian Theorems

Tauberian theorems are a type of mathematical theorem that helps mathematicians understand how certain infinite sums or series behave.

• "Integrability theorems for power series"
• "A note on uniformly distributed sequences"
• "General integrability theorems for power series"
• With P. Sziisz, "On a bounded increasing power series"
• "On a theorem of Sziisz"