Harald August BOHR

Harald Bohr was the younger brother of the renowned Nobel Prize-winning physicist Niels Bohr. Like his brother, he excelled in mathematics and science and school and became a well-known mathematician in his own right. He worked in the field of mathematical analysis, especially in almost periodic functions, and spent time studying under the British mathematician G. H. Hardy. Harald Bohr and his brother were very close, throughout their lives. Early in his career, it was thought that Harald would become the more famous scientist but his career was eclipsed by that of Niels Bohr, one of the most famous physicists of the 20th century. At the University of Købnhaven, the annual award for outstanding teaching is named in Harald Bohr’s honor.

Bohr worked on Dirichlet series, and applied analysis to the theory of numbers. He collaborated with Edmund Landau, to prove the Bohr-Landau theorem on the distribution of zeros of the Riemann zeta function, showing that all but an infinitesimal proportion of the zeros of the zeta function lie in a small neighborhood of the line s = 1/2. Between 1923-26 Bohr developed the theory of almost periodic functions, and developed a result on the uniform approximation to almost periodic functions by exponential functions.

As a footballer he played with the Akademisk Boldklub, beginning in 1903. He played through the 1908 Olympics, and played one further international with the Danish side in 1910 against England.