Life
Carleman was born in Visseltofta to Alma Linnéa Jungbeck and Karl Johan Carleman, a school teacher. He studied at Växjö Cathedral School, graduating in 1910.
He continued his studies at Uppsala University, being one of the active members of the Uppsala Mathematical Society. Kjellberg recalls:
He was a genius! My older friends in Uppsala used to tell me about the wonderful years they had had when Carleman was there. He was the most active speaker in the Uppsala Mathematical Society and a well-trained gymnast. When people left the seminar crossing the Fyris River, he walked on his hands on the railing of the bridge.
From 1917 he was docent at Uppsala University, and from 1923 — a full professor at Lund University. In 1924 he was appointed professor at Stockholm University. He was elected a member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in 1926. From 1927, he was director of the Mittag-Leffler Institute and editor of Acta Mathematica.
From 1929 to 1946 Carleman was married to Anna-Lisa Lemming (1885–1954), the half-sister of the athlete Eric Lemming who won four golden medals and three bronze at the Olympic Games.
Carlson remembers Carleman as: "secluded and taciturn, who looked at life and people with a bitter humour. In his heart, he was inclined to kindliness towards those around him, and strove to assist them swiftly." Towards the end of his life, he remarked to his students that "professors ought to be shot at the age of fifty."
During the last decades of his life, Carleman abused alcohol, according to Norbert Wiener and William Feller. His final years were plagued by neuralgia. At the end of 1948, he developed the liver disease jaundice; he died from complications of the disease.
Read more about this topic: Torsten Carleman
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