ERNEST WILLIAM HOBSON
DE MORGAN MEDALLIST 1920

Professor Hobson received the De Morgan Medal on 13 November 1920. He was occupied with his influential treatise The Theory of Functions of a Real Variable from 1907 to 1926. The first edition was published in 1907 as a single volume. The work was constantly revised over the next twenty years and nearly all of Hobson’s own contributions to real function theory, particularly in the theory of orthogonal series, appear only in the later editions. It was a standard treatise regarded as indispensable to researchers for many years and G.H. Hardy wrote that ‘there is no doubt that it is the most important book written by a modern English mathematician’.