Background
Beurling was born in Gothenburg, Sweden and was the son of the landowner Konrad Beurling and baroness Elsa Raab.
mathematician university professor
Beurling was born in Gothenburg, Sweden and was the son of the landowner Konrad Beurling and baroness Elsa Raab.
Uppsala University.
Beurling worked extensively in harmonic analysis, complex analysis and potential theory. The "Beurling factorization" helped mathematical scientists to understand the Wold decomposition, and inspired further work on the invariant subspaces of linear operators and operator algebras, e.g. Håkan Hedenmalm"s factorization theorem for Bergman spaces.
After graduating in 1924, he was enrolled at the Uppsala University where he received a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1926 and two years later a Licentiate of Philosophy degree.
Beurling was assistant teacher at Uppsala University from 1931 to 1933. He received his doctorate in mathematics in 1933 for his dissertation Études sur un problème de majoration.
Beurling was a docent of mathematics at Uppsala University from 1933 and then professor of mathematics from 1937 to 1954. He was visiting professor at Harvard University from 1948 to 1949.
From 1954 he was professor at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton University, United States, where he took over Albert Einstein"s office.
In the summer of 1940 he single-handedly deciphered and reverse-engineered an early version of the Siemens and Halske T52 also known as the Geheimfernschreiber ("secret teletypewriter") used by Nazi Germany in for sending ciphered messages. The T52 was one of the so-called "Fish cyphers", that, using transposition, created nearly one quintillion (893,622,318,929,520,960) different variations. lieutenant took Beurling two weeks to solve the problem using pen and paper.
Using Beurling"s work, a device was created that enabled Sweden to decipher German teleprinter traffic passing through Sweden from Norway on a cable.
In this way, Swedish authorities knew about Operation Barbarossa before it occurred. This became the foundation for the Swedish National Defence Radio Establishment (FRA).
The cypher in the Geheimfernschreiber is generally considered to be more complex than the cypher used in the Enigma machines. He was the doctoral advisor of Lennart Carleson and Carl-Gustav Esseen.
Beurling"s prowess as a cryptanalysist is the subject of the 2005 short opera Krypto CEG by Jonas Sjöstrand and Kimmo Eriksson.
Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. American Academy of Arts and Sciences.