Cahit Arf

Cahit Arf on the back of the Turkish 10 lira note

Cahit Arf (born October 11, 1910 in Thessaloniki , † December 26, 1997 in Istanbul ) was a Turkish mathematician . He is known for the Arf invariant of a square shape ( knot theory , topology ), the Hasse-Arf theorem ( branching ) and the Arf rings ( ring theory ).

Life

Cahit Arf was born on October 11, 1910 in Thessaloniki, which was then part of the Ottoman Empire . After the outbreak of the Balkan War in 1912, his family moved to Istanbul . The family eventually settled in Izmir , where Cahit Arf completed his elementary school education. With the help of a state scholarship, he continued his education at the École normal supérieure in Paris .

Back in Turkey, he taught math at Galatasaray High School . In 1933 he began studying mathematics at the University of Istanbul , in 1937 he went to the University of Göttingen , where he obtained his doctorate and worked with Helmut Hasse .

He then worked at Istanbul University. In 1962, President Cemal Gürsel commissioned him to found the Turkish Science and Research Council (TÜBİTAK). In 1963 he worked at Robert College in Istanbul. From 1964 to 1966 he worked at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton . He also taught for a year at the University of California, Berkeley .

Wall painting in honor of Arf in Istanbul

After his return to Turkey, he headed the Mathematics Institute of the Technical University of the Middle East and continued his research there until his retirement in 1980.

Arf was a member of the Academy of Sciences and Literature and the Turkish Academy of Sciences. From 1985 to 1989 he was President of the Turkish Mathematical Society. He died on December 26, 1997 at the age of 87 in Bebek, Istanbul . His collected work was published in 1988 by the Turkish Mathematical Society.

Arf had a great influence on the development of mathematics in Turkey. He supported and promoted almost all mathematicians working in Turkey today. Along with Selman Akbulut, Cahit Arf is considered to be the most important Turkish mathematician of the 20th century.

Cahit Arf is depicted on the back of the 10 Turkish Lira note issued in 2009 .

Awards

• 1948 Inönü Prize
• 1974 TÜBİTAK science award
• 1994 Commandeur des Palmes Academiques

Cahit Arf lectures

• 2018: Fernando Rodriguez Villegas, International Center for Theoretical Physics
• 2016: André Neves ( Imperial College London )
• 2015: Vladimir Voevodsky ( Institute for Advanced Study , Princeton)
• 2013/14: Persi Diaconis ( Stanford University )
• 2012: David E. Nadler ( Northwestern University , University of California, Berkeley )
• 2011: Jonathan Pila ( University of Oxford )
• 2010: John Morgan (mathematician) ( Stony Brook University )
• 2009: Ben Joseph Green ( University of Cambridge )
• 2008: Günter Harder ( University of Bonn and Max Planck Institute for Mathematics )
• 2007: Hendrik Lenstra ( University of Leiden )
• 2006: Jean-Pierre Serre ( Collège de France )
• 2005: Peter Sarnak ( Princeton University and Institute for Advanced Study )
• 2004: Robert Langlands ( Institute for Advanced Study )
• 2003: David Mumford ( Brown University , Division of Applied Mathematics)
• 2002: Don Zagier ( Utrecht University and Collège de France )
• 2001: Gerhard Frey ( University of Duisburg-Essen , Institute for Experimental Mathematics)

Web links

• Cahit Arf lectures
• John J. O'Connor, Edmund F. Robertson :  Cahit Arf. In: MacTutor History of Mathematics archive .
• Homepage of Cahit Arf
• Falko Lorenz , Peter Roquette : Cahit Arf and his invariant , 2011, preprint of an article in Peter Roquette: Contributions to the History of Number Theory in the 20th Century , 2013, ISBN 978-3-03719-113-2 , doi : 10.4171 / 113 , pp. 189-222.
• Author profile in the database zbMATH