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Burkill began his secondary education at Richmond county school which he entered in 1911. Three years later he entered St Paul's School, London, where he was an outstanding scholar of classical Greek and Latin as well as showing considerable talent for mathematics. After winning a scholarship to Trinity College, Cambridge in 1917 he spend a short time in the Royal Engineers as World War I had not ended. However he was soon commissioned but then demobbed after the war ended. He continued with his education entering Trinity College, Cambridge in January 1919. After taking his first degree in 1921 he remained at Cambridge as a research student being elected to a fellowship in the following year after submitting a dissertation on surface areas. He then won a Smith's prize in 1923 for Functions of intervals and the problem of area. In 1924 Burkill accepted the chair of pure mathematics at Liverpool and two years later Besicovitch joined him on the staff. He married Margareta Braun on 1 August 1928 and, at her insistence, he was known to all as Charles from that time on. Greta Braun (as she was called) had been born in Germany, having a German father and a Russian mother. Greta and Charles had three children, a son and two daughters. In 1929 Burkill returned to Cambridge taking up a a university lectureship and a lectureship at Peterhouse where he was also elected to a fellowship. He remained in this post for the rest of his life. After Hitler came to power in Germany in 1933 there were many refugees who came to England and the Burkills did amazing work supporting refugee children :
In fact the years of World War II saw Burkill with tasks which gave him no time to continue with his mathematical research. He remained at Cambridge while many others took up war service, but he now had to take on administrative duties to cover for his absent colleagues. He also joined the university training corps and had reached the rank of major in the Royal Engineers section by the time the war ended. He resumed his research in mathematics winning the Adams prize in 1948 for an essay on integrals and trigonometric series. His research achievements were recognised in 1953 when he was elected to a fellowship of the Royal Society . Burkill is equally well known for his research in analysis and the excellent teaching books which he wrote. He research is introduced in by saying:
Burkill introduced what is now called the 'Burkill integral' and applied it to extend W H Young 's work on the definition of the area of a curved surface. He introduced the notion of approximate differentiation extending and simplifying work of Besicovitch . Among his books are The Lebesgue integral (1951), A first course in mathematical analysis (1962) and A second course in mathematical analysis (1970). These are described in as follows:
Burkill himself sets out is aims in writing The Lebesgue integral in the introduction to the text:
A second course in mathematical analysis is described by T M Apostol in a review as a:
The book covers: sets and functions, metric spaces, continuous functions on metric spaces, real and complex limits and series, uniform convergence, Riemann - Stieltjes integration, multivariable differential and integral calculus, Fourier series, Cauchy 's theorem, Laurent expansions, residue calculus, infinite products, the factor theorem of Weierstrass , asymptotic expansions, and applications to special functions in particular the gamma function. In 1961 Cambridge promoted Burkill to be Reader in Mathematical Analysis. He retired in 1967 and a year later Sir Herbert Butterfield retired as Master of Peterhouse College. Burkill was appointed to succeed Butterfield as Master and he served from 1968 until 1973 :
After retiring as Master, he served as editor of the Mathematical Proceedings of the Cambridge Philosophical Society. However he continued his interest in integration theories and published a short paper Fourier-Stieltjes integrals in 1973. It examines problems in Fourier analysis that led to the development of the theory of generalised functions. In Burkill is described as having a:
His character is described in as follows:
Greta Burkill died in 1984 and Burkill did a large amount of work in putting her papers on her refugee work into order so that they could be deposited in the Cambridge University Library. We mentioned above that the Burkills took over the responsibility of educating two refugee children who went on to become professional mathematicians. One of these was Harry Burkill who was on the staff at Sheffield University. After his health failed, Burkill lived in a Sheffield nursing home. He died there of bronchopneumonia although he had suffered from Alzheimer's disease for some time. After he was cremated his ashes were scattered at Hutcliffe Wood crematorium in Sheffield. Source:School of Mathematics and Statistics University of St Andrews, Scotland |