CACrown ArchivesThe cinema collection
Menu
Research dossier · People & Ideas

Thomas William Körner

British mathematician

Correspondence, annotated notebooks and portrait silhouettes prepared for research
People and ideasInterpretive dossier study · Crown Archives visual atlas
Record originEnglish Wikipedia
Text licenseCC BY-SA 4.0
Source revisionAug 29, 2026
Entity authorityQ73694
Source-derived summary

Thomas William Körner (born 17 February 1946) is a British pure mathematician and the author of three books on popular mathematics. He is titular Professor of Fourier Analysis in the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of Trinity Hall. He is the son of the philosopher Stephan Körner and of Edith Körner.

He studied at Trinity Hall, Cambridge, and wrote his PhD thesis Some Results on Kronecker, Dirichlet and Helson Sets there in 1971, studying under Nicholas Varopoulos. In 1972 he won the Salem Prize.

He has written academic mathematics books aimed at undergraduates:

Fourier Analysis

Exercises for Fourier Analysis

A Companion to Analysis

Vectors, Pure and Applied

Calculus for the Ambitious

He has also written three books aimed at secondary school students, the popular 1996 title The Pleasures of Counting, Naive Decision Making (published 2008) on probability, statistics and game theory, and Where Do Numbers Come From? (published October 2019).

Editorial summary

This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Thomas William Körner” as british mathematician. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.

Editorial reviewA productive starting point for separating a subject’s documented career from later reputation and commemoration. The current lead gives the account dated anchors—1946, 1971, 1972, 1996—that can be checked directly. The linked authority record independently contributes the date 1946-02-17. The account is most persuasive where Thomas, William and Körner can be independently traced.
Editorial analysis

Why this record matters

The subject matters to the people & ideas register because the source frames it as british mathematician. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.

Evidence profile

Chronology provides the most reliable spine for this subject; interpretation should follow only after identities and dates are secure. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 29, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q73694. VIAF identifies the subject as 259144647708917467797. The Library of Congress control number is n85062597. 4 of 4 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1946, 1971, 1972 and 1996.

Critical limits

Later biographies can compress uncertainty and repeat inherited reputations, so apparently settled claims may still require comparison. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.

How to read it

Read biographical claims against dates, named institutions and the cited references. Distinguish a subject’s later reputation from evidence produced during their lifetime.

Best used for
  • Establishing names and roles
  • Building a first chronology
  • Locating cited institutions
Verify next

Personal papers, civil or court records, institutional files and the scholarship cited by the source.

Three-step research path

  1. Establish the record: confirm the title “Thomas William Körner”, its source revision and the description used here.
  2. Expand the search: follow Thomas William Körner primary sources, Thomas William Körner archive and Thomas research across catalogues and specialist indexes.
  3. Test the account: compare the strongest cited source with the responsible institution’s current record and note any disagreement.

Questions for further research

  1. Which source most directly establishes the central claim about “Thomas William Körner”?
  2. Which claims depend on a single source or contested interpretation?
  3. Which primary records establish identity, chronology and institutional ties?
Subject index

Search terms from this dossier

Source & attribution

This entry incorporates text from Thomas William Körner” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.