Hirschman earned his Ph.D. in 1947 from Harvard under David Widder. After writing ten papers together, Hirschman and Widder published a book entitled The Convolution Transform.[1] Hirschman spent most of his career (1949–1978) at Washington University, publishing mainly in harmonic analysis and operator theory. Washington University holds a lecture series given by Hirschman, with one lecture given by Richard Askey.[1] While Askey was at Washington University, Hirschman asked him to solve an ultraspherical polynomial problem. Askey says in this lecture, "This led to a joint paper, and was what started my interest in special functions."[2]
Research
Hirschman's PhD was entitled “Some Representation and Inversion Problems for the Laplace Transform,” He mainly published papers in harmonic analysis and operator theory. In 1959 Hirschman wrote a paper with Askey, Weighted quadratic norms and ultraspherical polynomials, published in the Transactions of the American Mathematical Society.[2] This was one of the two articles Hirschman and Askey co-wrote to complete Hirschman's 1955 research program.[2]
In 1964 Hirschman published Extreme eigenvalues of Toeplitz forms associated with Jacobi polynomials, showing that for banded Toeplitz matrices, eigenvalues accumulate on a spatial curve, in the complex plane with the normalized eigenvalue counting measure converging weakly to a measure on this curve as .[3]
—— (1950). "On the Behaviour of Fourier Transforms at Infinity and on Quasi-Analytic Classes of Functions". American Journal of Mathematics. 72 (1): 200–213. doi:10.2307/2372147. JSTOR2372147.
Hirschman, I. (1962). Infinite Series. New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston.[4] – A textbook for advanced undergraduate and graduate mathematics.[5]
Hirschman, Isidore Isaac; Widder, David Vernon (1955). The Convolution Transform. New York: Princeton University Press;[6] now available from Dover Publications.[7]