Harold Davenport

Harold Davenport (1907 to 1969) was an English mathematician best known for his work in number theory, in particular the geometry of numbers, Diophantine approximation and the analytic theory of numbers. Born in Huncoat, Lancashire, he studied at Manchester and then at Trinity College, Cambridge, where he wrote a doctoral thesis under Littlewood on the distribution of quadratic residues, using new methods for character sums and exponential sums. He proved that every sufficiently large number is the sum of sixteen fourth powers, a contribution to Waring's problem. He held chairs at Bangor, University College London and, from 1958, at Cambridge as Rouse Ball Professor, became a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1940 and received its Sylvester Medal in 1967. His books include The Higher Arithmetic (1952), Analytic Methods for Diophantine Equations and Diophantine Inequalities (1962) and Multiplicative Number Theory (1967).