Talk:Ralph Henstock

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Death
I can't find any reference - no news articles, no university press releases, no websites, not even a blog that mentions his death. User who posted the death hasn't posted anything before or since. If no one can show me a reason why I should believe he's dead, then the edits will be reverted in a few days. Canadian Paul 19:30, 17 January 2007 (UTC)
 * I received an e-mail from his pupil P. Muldowney announcing his death. There will probably sooner or later be an obit, for instance in the proceedings of some conference on non-absolutely convergent integrals. Jfranke 11:18, 18 January 2007 (UTC)
 * I heard this news from V.A.Skvortsov yesterday.--a_dergachev 17:08, 13 September 2007 (UTC)

Ward Integral
I have linked this to John Clive Ward. This is an educated guess- unfortunately my education was not in mathematics! 82.36.178.185 (talk) 11:39, 9 May 2008 (UTC)

Opening Paragraph
A point in the opening paragraph: "As an Integration theorist, he is notable for developing the work of Jaroslav Kurzweil." Great care has been taken in this subject not to open up any Newton/Leibniz-type argument about priority in the creation of the subject. The way this issue has been dealt with, and indeed the truth of the matter, is to say that Kurzweil and Henstock discovered the idea independently in the 1950's. Kurzweil used the idea to solve a problem in differential equations, in a paper published in 1957, but did not, at the time, extend the idea into a theory of integration. In 1960[*] Henstock published a book containing the first developed theory of integration on these lines. Henstock was unaware of Kurzweil's paper until a correspondent in Prague mentioned it to him in a letter in 1963. As far as I can remember offhand, Henstock described this encounter in some later publication of his own. Anyway, when I was sorting Henstock's papers for archiving last year I found this 1963 letter.

So it is not strictly true to say that "(Henstock) is notable for developing the work of Jaroslav Kurzweil", since he brought the theory to a highly developed stage without ever having encountered Kurzweil's 1957 paper. Even in terms of which of them was, in calendar terms, the first in print with the idea, there is a case for giving the prize to Henstock, since it crops up in a 1955 paper of his. But that gets a bit silly, since ideas like this are often churning around in people's heads often for a long time before they actually appear in formal publication. Indeed, some very important ideas remain for a long period in word-of-mouth, lecture form or the like.

Anyway, I think the "independently developed" line is the widely accepted one.User:Pat Muldowney —Preceding unsigned comment added by 82.36.178.185 (talk) 13:00, 9 May 2008 (UTC)

[*] The book referred to here is Theory of Integration, published by Butterworth in 1962 and re-published in 1963. The 1963 version is the only one generally available. Pat Muldowney (talk) 20:50, 16 June 2018 (UTC)

External links modified
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