Gheorghe Vrânceanu

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Gheorghe Vrânceanu (born June 30, 1900 in Valea Hogei , † April 27, 1979 in Bucharest ) was a Romanian mathematician .

Life

Vranceanu was the son of poor farmers. His talent was noticed by the village school teacher, who made sure that he could attend high school. From 1919 he studied mathematics on a scholarship at the University of Iasi , where he became an assistant at the mathematics seminar in 1921 and graduated in 1922. In 1923 he went to the University of Göttingen to David Hilbert and then to the University of Rome , where he received his doctorate in 1924 under Tullio Levi-Civita ( Sopra una teorema di Weierstrass e le sue applicazioni alla stabilita ). He returned to Iasi. His discovery of non-holonomic spaces (now named after him) quickly made him famous in 1926. He became a lecturer in Iasi and in 1927/28 went on a Rockefeller scholarship to Paris, where he worked with Élie Cartan , and to the USA at Harvard University and Princeton University , where he made the acquaintance of George David Birkhoff and Oswald Veblen . Although he was offered an academic career in the USA, he returned to Romania. In 1929 he became a professor at the University of Cernauti and in 1939 professor at the University of Bucharest as the successor to Gheorghe Țițeica . In 1948 he became the holder of the chair for geometry and topology. In 1970 he retired, but remained mathematically active.

His scientific focus was on geometry (in which he researched in many areas) and its application in mechanics. He wrote several textbooks, including one on differential geometry (the book has been translated into French and German).

In 1928 at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Bologna he introduced non-holonomic manifolds (Parallelisme et courbure dans une variété non holonome), in today's definition smooth manifolds provided with a smooth distribution that is generally not integrable. This happened around the same time through John L. Synge and other important contributions were made soon after by the Russian mathematician V. Vagner and Jan Arnoldus Schouten . They arose from the need to find a geometric analog for non- holonomic mechanical systems.

He was also politically active and in 1944 one of the founders of a party opposed to further struggle against the Soviet Union.

He was editor of the revue Roumaine de Mathématiques Pures et Appliquées and tried to establish international contacts by organizing conferences and visiting professorships around the world. Around 300 scientific papers originate from him.

In 1946 he became a corresponding and in 1955 a full member of the Romanian Academy of Sciences, whose mathematics department he headed from 1964. He was an honorary doctor from the University of Bologna and the University of Iasi. In 1970 he became a member of the Royal Flemish Academy of Sciences in Brussels. In 1975 he became Vice President of the International Mathematical Union.

Vranceanu was involved in the publication of the collected works of Elie Cartan.

His PhD students include Kostake Teleman and Henri Moscovici .

Fonts

  • Opera matematica, 4 volumes, Bucharest 1969 to 1977
  • Les espaces non holonomes, Paris, Gauthier-Villars 1936
  • Interprétation géométrique des processus probabilistiques continus, Gauthier-Villars 1969
  • Lectures on differential geometry, Berlin, Akademie Verlag 1961 (translator Max Pinl from French, original in Romanian in 4 volumes)

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Mathematics Genealogy Project
  2. Here, distribution is understood as a family of linear subspaces of the tangent space of a smooth real manifold M ( ), which continuously depends on x.
  3. AM Vershik, V. Ya. Gerhskovich Nonholonomic dynamical systems, Geometry of Distributions and Variational Problems in Arnold, Novikov Dynamical Systems VII , Encyclopedia of Mathematics, Springer Verlag