Roy O. Davies
1927–2023, Uttoxeter, England, Leicester, England
English mathematician who settled the two-dimensional Kakeya problem in 1971, proving that every Kakeya set in the plane has full Hausdorff dimension.
Roy Davies spent his career at the University of Leicester, working in geometric measure theory, set theory, and real analysis. His 1971 paper "Some remarks on the Kakeya problem" proved that although a Besicovitch (Kakeya) set in the plane can have Lebesgue measure zero, it must still have Hausdorff and Minkowski dimension equal to 2, settling the two-dimensional case of what became known as the Kakeya conjecture and motivating its formulation in higher dimensions. He was a longtime friend and correspondent of Paul Erdős.
Workplaces: University of Leicester
United Kingdom