Edvard Pragmén was a precocious student. He left Uppsala after less than a year to become an assistant to the newly appointed professor Mittag-Leffler in Stockholm. One of his duties was proofreading and other editorial work for the "Acta Mathematica". Already as a young man of 21 he had a couple of papers presented to the Swedish Academy of Science (1883), and the next year in the "Acta" he gave a new proof of the Cantor-Bendixson theorem. His strong critical sense manifested itself when, preparing Poincaré's prize memoir on the three-body problem for printing in the "Acta", he found a serious error in it. The memoir had to be rewritten. From 1889 till the end of his life, Pragmén was one of the editors of the "Acta".
When Sonja Kovalevski died in 1891, two young mathematicians were available to fill the vacancy: Edvard Pragmén and Ivar Bendixson. Mittag-Leffler preferred Phragmén, and in 1893 he was appointed professor at the University of Stockholm. He worked on elliptic functions and complex function theory. His most famous result is his powerful extension of Liouville's theorem om bounded entire functions. A first version was done by Phragmén alone, later on he and the Finnish mathematician Ernst Lindelöf together found a stronger version (Acta Math. 31, 1908). In addition to the function theory, Phragmén worked on insurance mathematics, and he also wrote on the theory of voting, and was a member of a committee to prepare new legislation on elections. As already noted, Pragmén left his professorship after ten years to become a leading person in the Swedish insurance world. He was President of the Swedish Society of Actuaries for many years from 1909 on.
Article by: B. Birkeland