Alfréd Rényi
Alfréd Rényi [ ˈɒlfreːd ˈreːɲi ] (born March 20, 1921 in Budapest ; † February 1, 1970 ibid) was a Hungarian mathematician who mainly dealt with probability theory and number theory .
Life
Rényi's father Artur was an engineer (whose father was originally Rosenthal and immigrated from Germany) and his mother Barbara Alexandra was the daughter of the professor of philosophy in Budapest, Bernát Alexander. At high school, Renyi was initially more interested in classical languages and astronomy, but under the influence of his teacher, the mathematician Rózsa Péter, turned to mathematics. Since access for Jewish students was limited, he was initially unable to study at the top of his school despite his excellent Abitur, but worked in a factory and at a shipyard for six months. He studied at the University of Budapest with Lipót Fejér and Pál Turán, among others, and graduated there in 1944. In 1944 he was briefly in a labor camp run by the Hungarian fascists, but before being transported to the West he managed to escape and go into hiding in Budapest, where he disguised himself as a soldier and freed his parents from the ghetto. In March 1945 he did his doctorate at the University of Szeged with Frigyes Riesz on analysis.
In 1946 he was with Juri Linnik and Iwan Matwejewitsch Vinogradow in Leningrad , where he wrote a second doctoral thesis that solved the so-called quasi- Goldbach conjecture . As early as 1932, Theodor Estermann had proven, assuming the validity of the generalized Riemann conjecture for Dirichlet L functions, that any sufficiently large even number can be represented as the sum of a prime number and a number with a maximum of 6 factors. Renyi now proved that a constant K exists in such a way that every even number can be written as the sum of a prime number and a number with a maximum of K prime factors. Renyi succeeded in this proof using a theorem he proved about the zeros Dirichletscher L-functions and with methods of the Great Sieve by Juri Linnik and without using the Riemann Hypothesis as a prerequisite.
In the autumn of 1947 Rényi became assistant professor and private lecturer at the University of Budapest and was also an associate professor at the University of Debrecen from 1949 to 1950 . In 1950 he became director of the Institute for Applied Mathematics of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, later the Mathematical Research Institute (now named after him as the Alfred Renyi Institute). 1952 Rényi became dean of the faculty for probability theory at the Lorand Eötvös University of Budapest. He held both positions until his death. He was visiting professor at the University of Michigan , the University of North Carolina , Stanford University , the University of Erlangen and a fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge University .
plant
In addition to number theory (see above) and probability theory and statistics, Rényi dealt with many areas of mathematics, including combinatorics, graph theory, analysis and information theory, where he introduced the Rényi entropy as a generalization of Shannon entropy . He is considered the founder of the Hungarian school of probability theory, gave a probabilistic formulation of Linnik's Great Sieve of analytical number theory and applied not only probabilistic methods in number theory, but also, conversely, number theoretical methods in probability theory, where, for example, the mixed theorems of Renyi from Linniks Follow large sieve method. Rényi published 32 papers together with Paul Erdős , of which one is particularly known about random graphs. He was interested in the philosophy of mathematics, ancient mathematics history, mathematics education, and entertainment mathematics, and wrote several popular science books. He could no longer complete the book Diary on Information Theory ; it was published by Gyula Katona after his death.
He introduced a new axiomatic justification of probability theory (with spaces of conditional probabilities), about which he lectured at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Amsterdam in 1954 and about which he published a book in 1970.
Rényi was editor of the Studia Scientiarum Mathematica Hungarica and on the editorial board (among others) of Acta Mathematica, the journal for probability theory, the Journal of Applied Probability and the Journal of Combinatorial Analysis. Together with Tibor Szele and Ottó Varga he founded the Publicationes Mathematicae Debrecen.
Memberships and honors
Rényi had been a corresponding member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences since 1949 and a full member since 1956 . In 1949 and 1954 he received the Kossuth Prize . From 1949 to 1955 he was secretary of the Janos Bolyai Mathematical Society. From 1965 to 1969 he headed the International Statistical Institute . He was a fellow of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics.
In 1962 he gave a lecture at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Stockholm ( On the theory of outstanding observations ) and in 1958 in Edinburgh ( Probabilistic methods in number theory ).
Private
Alfréd Rényi was married to the mathematician Katalin Schulhof (1924–1969, also known as Kató Renyi) since 1946, with whom he also published. Together they had a daughter Zsuzsa.
ancestry
| Rosenthal immigrants from Germany |
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| Artur Rényi engineer |
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| Alfréd Rényi (1921–1970) mathematician |
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| Bernát Alexander Professor of Philosophy in Budapest |
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| Barbara Alexandra | ||||||||||||||||
Fonts
- Probability calculation. With an appendix on information theory (= university books for mathematics . Vol. 54). Deutscher Verlag der Wissenschaften, Berlin 1962, 4th edition 1973 (English edition North Holland 1970).
- Dialogues about math. Birkhäuser 1967.
- Letters about probability. Birkhäuser 1969.
- Information theory diary. German Science Publishers, Berlin 1982.
- Foundations of probability. 1970.
Quote
A mathematician is a machine that turns coffee into sentences.
See also
Web links
- John J. O'Connor, Edmund F. Robertson : Alfréd Rényi. In: MacTutor History of Mathematics archive .
- Alfréd Rényi (English)
- Rényi Alfréd (Hungarian)
- Turan on Renyi
- Literature by and about Alfréd Rényi in the catalog of the German National Library
Individual evidence
- ↑ Renyi on the representation of an even number as the sum of a prime number and an almost prime number , Doklady Akad. Nauka SSR, Vol. 56, 1947, pp. 455–458 (Russian), reprinted in Yuan Wang The Goldbach Conjecture , World Scientific , and in more detail in Izvestija Akad. Nauka SSR, Ser.Math., Vol. 12, 1948, pp. 57-78
- ↑ Journal for Pure and Applied Mathematics, Vol. 168, 1932, p. 106
- ↑ MacTutor article on Rényi. The saying is often ascribed to Paul Erdős.
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Rényi, Alfréd |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | Hungarian mathematician |
| DATE OF BIRTH | March 20, 1921 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Budapest |
| DATE OF DEATH | 1st February 1970 |
| Place of death | Budapest |