Abram Samoilovitch Besicovitch
A. S. Besicovitch | |
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Abram Samoilovitch Besicovitch (1891-1970)
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Born | Abram Samoilovitch Besicovitch 23 January 1891 Berdyansk, Russian Empire |
Died | Script error: The function "death_date_and_age" does not exist. Cambridge, UK |
Residence | United Kingdom |
Nationality | Russian Empire and British |
Fields | Mathematician |
Institutions | University of Liverpool University of Cambridge |
Alma mater | St Petersburg University |
Doctoral advisor | Andrey Markov[1] |
Doctoral students | Oliver Aberth Roy Davies Joseph Gillis Patrick Moran Ernst Reifenberg Samuel Taylor Gholamhossein Mosaheb Grant Walker[1] |
Known for | Hausdorff-Besicovitch dimension Besicovitch functions Besicovitch covering theorem |
Influenced | Freeman Dyson[2] |
Notable awards | Adams Prize (1930) De Morgan Medal (1950) Sylvester Medal (1952) Fellow of the Royal Society[3] |
Abram Samoilovitch Besicovitch (or Besikovitch)[3] (Russian: Абра́м Само́йлович Безико́вич; 23 January 1891 – 2 November 1970) was a Russian mathematician, who worked mainly in England. He was born in Berdyansk on the Sea of Azov (now in Ukraine) to a Karaite family.[4][5][6][7][8][9][10]
Contents
Life and career
Abram Besicovitch studied under the supervision of Andrey Markov at the St. Petersburg University, graduating with a PhD in 1912.[1] He then began research in probability theory. He converted to Eastern Orthodoxy, joining the Russian Orthodox Church, on marrying in 1916. He was appointed professor at the University of Perm in 1917, and was caught up in the Russian Civil War over the next two years. In 1920 he took a position at the Petrograd University.
In 1924 he went to Copenhagen and Harald Bohr, on a Rockefeller Fellowship, where he worked on almost periodic functions, which now bear his name. After a visit to G.H. Hardy at the University of Oxford, he had appointments at the University of Liverpool in 1926, and the University of Cambridge in 1927.
After moving to Cambridge in 1927, and by 1950 he had been appointed to the Rouse Ball Chair of Mathematics, which he held until his retirement in 1958, he then toured the USA for eight years before returning to Trinity College Cambridge until probably his death in 1970. He was appointed Lecturer in the Faculty of Mathematics, and therefore received recognition as a Cambridge MA by 'Special Grace' on 24 November 1928. He worked mainly on combinatorial methods and questions in real analysis, such as the Kakeya needle problem and the Hausdorff-Besicovitch dimension. These two particular areas have proved increasingly important as the years have gone by.
He was also a major influence on the economist Piero Sraffa, after 1940, when they were both Fellows of Trinity College, Cambridge, and on Dennis Lindley, one of the founders of the Bayesian movement in the United Kingdom. He was J.E. Littlewood's successor in 1950 in the Rouse Ball chair at the University of Cambridge, retiring in 1958. He died in Cambridge.
Awards and honours
Besicovitch was in 1934 made FRS[3] and in 1952 won the Sylvester Medal from the Royal Society.[11] He received in 1950 the De Morgan Medal of the London Mathematical Society. He was a visiting scholar at the Institute for Advanced Study in the fall of 1954.[12]
Besicovtich's candidacy for the Royal Society reads:<templatestyles src="Template:Blockquote/styles.css" />
"Distinguished as a pure mathematician, particularly for his researches in the theory of functions of a real variable, the theory of analytic functions, and the theory of almost periodic functions. "[13]
The asteroid 16953 Besicovitch is named in his honor.
A portrait of Besicovitch by Eve Goldsmith Coxeter is in the collection of Trinity College, Cambridge.[14]
Quotation
- A mathematician´s reputation rests on the number of bad proofs he has given.[15]
See also
References
- ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 Abram Samoilovitch Besicovitch at the Mathematics Genealogy Project
- ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
- ↑ 3.0 3.1 3.2 Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
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- ↑ Almost periodic functions, Cambridge 1932,
- ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
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- ↑ Besicovitch On Kakeyas Problem and a similar one, Math. Zeitschrift vol.27, 1928, 312
- ↑ Besicovitch On linear sets of points of fractal dimension, Math. Annalen 1929, Teil 2,
- ↑ Entry in Archive of the Royal Society.
- ↑ Institute for Advanced Study: A Community of Scholars
- ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
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- ↑ Besicovitch, quoted in John Edensor Littlewood, A mathematician´s miscellany, Methuen 1953, p.42. In Littlewood's words Pioneer work is clumsy.
External links
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- Abram Samoilovitch Besicovitch at the Mathematics Genealogy Project
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- Articles containing Russian-language text
- 1891 births
- 1970 deaths
- People from Berdyansk
- People from Taurida Governorate
- 20th-century mathematicians
- 20th-century British mathematicians
- Jewish scientists
- British Jews
- Ukrainian Jews
- Ukrainian mathematicians
- Saint Petersburg State University alumni
- Perm State University faculty
- Fellows of Trinity College, Cambridge
- Members of the Department of Pure Mathematics and Mathematical Statistics
- Institute for Advanced Study visiting scholars
- Converts to Eastern Orthodoxy from Judaism
- Fellows of the Royal Society
- Rockefeller Fellows