Felix Pollaczek

Felix Pollaczek (born December 1, 1892 in Vienna , † April 29, 1981 in Boulogne-Billancourt ) was an Austro-French mathematician and engineer.

Pollaczek studied at the Technical University of Vienna and the Technical University of Brno , where he graduated in electrical engineering in 1920. In 1922 he received his doctorate in mathematics under Issai Schur at the Humboldt University in Berlin ( on the circular bodies of the th and th roots of unity ${\displaystyle l}$ ${\displaystyle l^{2}}$ ). He then worked from 1921 to 1923 as a telephone engineer at AEG in Berlin, and from 1923 to 1933 at the Reichspost in Berlin Tempelhof. In 1933 he was released as a Jew. He went to Paris, where he became a consulting engineer at the Societé d´Etudes pour Liaisons Telegraphiques et Telephoniques . In 1947 he became a French citizen. From 1939 to 1940 and again from 1944 he was Maitre de Recherches of the CNRS .

He dealt with number theory, analysis, probability theory and theoretical physics combined with his work as an electrical engineer. The Pollaczek- Chintchin formula in queuing theory (1930) and special orthogonal polynomials , which Arthur Erdélyi named after him, are named after him.

In 1977 he received the John von Neumann Theory Prize .

Since 1921 he was married to the mathematician Hilda Geiringer , from whom he separated in 1922 and with whom he had a daughter.

literature

• JW Cohen, Obituary in Journal of Applied Probability, Vol. 18, No. 4, Dec. 1981, pp. 958-963.

Web links

• Literature by and about Felix Pollaczek in the catalog of the German National Library