Norman Levinson

Norman Levinson (1912 to 1975) was an American mathematician born in Lynn, Massachusetts, whose major contributions were in the study of Fourier transforms, complex analysis, non-linear differential equations, number theory and signal processing. He earned bachelor's and master's degrees in electrical engineering at MIT in 1934, studied under Norbert Wiener, and received his PhD in mathematics from MIT in 1935 after a fellowship at the University of Cambridge. He joined the MIT faculty in 1937. He won the Bocher Memorial Prize in 1954 and the Chauvenet Prize in 1971, and in 1974 published a long paper proving that more than a third of the zeros of the Riemann zeta function lie on the critical line, a result later improved to two fifths by Conrey. His doctoral students included Raymond Redheffer and Harold Shapiro.