Mathematician:George David Birkhoff

American mathematician best known for what is now known as the Ergodic Theorem.

The father of Garrett Birkhoff.

Nationality
American

History

 * Born: 21 March 1884, Overisel, Michigan
 * Died: 12 November 1944, Cambridge, Massachusetts

Theorems and Definitions

 * Chromatic Polynomial
 * Birkhoff's Axioms
 * Birkhoff's Theorem (Relativity)
 * Birkhoff's Theorem (Electromagnetism)
 * Birkhoff's Ergodic Theorem
 * Birkhoff-Grothendieck Theorem (with Alexander Grothendieck)
 * Poincaré-Birkhoff-Witt Theorem (with Henri Poincaré and Ernst Witt)
 * Birkhoff Interpolation
 * Equidistribution Theorem

Books and Papers

 * 1906: General mean value and remainder theorems with applications to mechanical differentiation and quadrature
 * 1907: Asymptotic Properties of Certain Ordinary Differential Equations with Applications to Boundary Value and Expansion Problems (PhD thesis)
 * 1913: Proof of Poincaré's geometric theorem
 * 1917: Dynamical Systems with Two Degrees of Freedom
 * 1923: Relativity and Modern Physics (with R. E. Langer)
 * 1927: Dynamical Systems
 * 1931: Proof of the ergodic theorem
 * 1932: A Set of Postulates for Plane Geometry (Based on Scale and Protractors)
 * 1933: Aesthetic Measure
 * 1937: Representability of Lie algebras and Lie groups by matrices
 * 1938: Electricity as a Fluid
 * 1941: Basic Geometry (which contains Birkhoff's Axioms)