Harald August Bohr was born on April 22, 1887, and died on January 22, 1951. He was a Danish mathematician and soccer player. After earning his doctorate in 1910, Bohr became a well-known mathematician and helped create the study of almost periodic functions. His brother was Niels Bohr, a physicist who won a Nobel Prize. Bohr played for Denmark's national team during the 1908 Summer Olympics and won a silver medal.
Biography
Niels Bohr was born in 1887. His father was Christian Bohr, a professor who studied the human body and worked at a university. His mother was Ellen Adler Bohr, who came from a wealthy Jewish family that was well-known in their community. Niels had a close relationship with his older brother. A newspaper called The Times compared their bond to the friendship between two characters, Captain Cuttle and Captain Bunsby, in a book written by Charles Dickens called Dombey and Son.
Mathematical career
In 1904, Bohr joined the University of Copenhagen, where he studied mathematics. He received his master's degree in 1909 and his doctorate in 1910. His teachers included Hieronymus Georg Zeuthen and Thorvald N. Thiele. Bohr focused on mathematical analysis, and much of his early work involved Dirichlet series. His doctoral thesis was titled Bidrag til de Dirichletske Rækkers Theori (Contributions to the Theory of Dirichlet Series). He collaborated with Edmund Landau, a mathematician from Göttingen, to develop the Bohr–Landau theorem, which describes the distribution of zeroes in zeta functions.
Bohr helped create the field of almost periodic functions and worked with G. H. Hardy, a mathematician from Cambridge.
In 1915, he became a professor at Polyteknisk Læreanstalt (now the Technical University of Denmark), where he taught until 1930. He then became a professor at the University of Copenhagen, a position he held for 21 years until his death in 1951. One of his students during this time was Børge Jessen.
Bohr was a visiting professor at Stanford University from 1930 to 1931 and a visiting scholar at the Institute for Advanced Study in 1948.
He was known for his teaching, and the University of Copenhagen’s annual award for outstanding teaching is named the Harald, after his brother, Harald Bohr. With Johannes Mollerup, Bohr co-authored a four-volume textbook titled Lærebog i Matematisk Analyse (Textbook in Mathematical Analysis).
In 1945, Bohr was elected to the American Philosophical Society.
During the 1930s, Bohr strongly opposed anti-Semitic policies in German mathematics. In 1934, he published an article in Berlingske Aften criticizing Ludwig Bieberbach’s ideas. After the murder of Kaj Munk on January 4, 1944, the Danish resistance newspaper De frie Danske shared reactions from influential Scandinavians, including Bohr.
Football
Bohr was also a skilled football player. He began his career with Akademisk Boldklub at the age of 16 in 1903. In 1905, he played with his brother Niels, who was a goalkeeper. In 1908, Bohr was chosen to play for the Denmark national team during the Summer Olympics, where football was an official competition for the first time. Although Denmark had played in the 1906 Intercalated Games, the first match of the 1908 Olympic tournament was Denmark’s first official international football game. Bohr scored two goals as Denmark defeated the French "B" team 9–0. In the next match, a semi-final, Bohr helped Denmark win 17–1 against France, a result that still holds as an Olympic record. Denmark lost 2–0 to the host country, Great Britain, in the final, and Bohr received a silver medal. After the Olympics, Bohr played one more match for the national team, helping Denmark win 2–1 against an English amateur team in 1910. His fame as a footballer was so great that when he presented his doctoral thesis, more people came to watch him than to listen to his academic work.