BOHR, HARALD AUGUST

born April 22, 1887, Copenhagen, Den. died Jan. 22, 1951, Copenhagen Danish mathematician who devised a theory that concerned generalizations of functions with periodic properties, the theory of almost periodic functions. The brother of the noted physicist Niels Bohr, he became professor at the Polytechnic Institute in Copenhagen in 1915 and at the University of Copenhagen in 1930. His early mathematical research was mainly concerned with the Dirichlet series, a series introduced by Peter Dirichlet of Germany in the application of analysis to the theory of numbers. Later, in collaboration with Edmund Landau of Germany, Bohr concentrated his efforts on a study of the Riemann zeta function, a function of fundamental importance to the theory of prime numbers and also to the theory of analytic functions in general. In 1914 they formulated the theorem (now called the BohrLandau theorem), which concerns the conditions under which the zeta function is equal to zero (distribution of zeros).