Le Van Thiem

Lê Văn Thiêm , also Le-Van Thiem, (born March 29, 1918 in Ha Tinh , Vietnam, † July 3, 1991 in Ho Chi Minh City ) was a Vietnamese mathematician. He took a leading role in the development of mathematics and mathematics higher education in Vietnam. His specialty was function theory .

Le Van Thiem came from an intellectual family as the youngest of 13 siblings and moved with his brother to Quy Nhơn after the death of his parents in 1930 , where he stood out in high school for his mathematical skills. His eldest brother had obtained one of the last degrees in 1919 under the old Confucian system (the Tien si equivalent to a doctorate in the West ). Le Van Thiem studied at the University of Indochina (now Vietnam National University) in Hanoi . Since he could not study mathematics there, he turned to the natural sciences. After completing his studies, he received a scholarship to the École normal supérieure in Paris in 1939 because of his brilliant graduation to continue his studies, but was only able to start studying in 1941 due to the Second World War. He graduated after just a year. Under Georges Valiron he specialized in function theory and especially the value distribution theory (Nevanlinna theory) of Rolf Nevanlinna and made important contributions to the so-called inversion problem of Nevanlinna theory (later solved by David Drasin ). He built on the methods of Oswald Teichmüller , and Anatolii Asirovich Goldberg later built on both of them . In 1945 he received his doctorate in Göttingen and in 1949 he received his Doctorat d´Etat in Paris. He went to Nevanlinna in Zurich, but returned to Vietnam in 1949 as a supporter of the independence movements directed against the French colonial rulers. With other intellectuals, mostly also trained in France, the resistance rallied in North Vietnam. Le Van Thiem and others founded a school for teacher training and one for the training of technicians and scientists. The schools existed until the end of French colonial rule in 1954 and from them the University of Hanoi emerged in 1955, which consisted of a purely Vietnamese college of professors. In 1970 he became the first director of the Vietnam Institute of Mathematics.

Together with Hoang Tuy and Ta Quang Buu, he founded the Vietnam Journal of Mathematics and Acta Mathematica Vietnamica (which published in English, French and Russian). For students he founded the journal Mathematics and Youth.

A street in Hanoi is named after him.

Fonts

• On the inverse problem of value distribution theory, Commentarii Mathematici Helvetici, Volume 23, 1949, pp. 26-49, digitized
• Contribution to the type problem of Riemann surfaces, Commentarii Mathematici Helvetici, Volume 20, 1947, pp. 270–287, digitized

literature

• Ha Huy Khoai: On contemporary mathematics in Vietnam, in Eberhard Knobloch, Hikosaburo Komatsu, Dun Liu (eds.): Seki, Founder of Modern Mathematics in Japan: A Commemoration on his Tercentenary, Springer 2013, p. 376

References and comments

1. ↑ On the role of Le Van Thiem in the history of the reversal problem, see the remark by Drasin, Bulletin, AMS, Volume 80, 1974, p. 767, digitized . According to his own information in his 1949 essay, Le Van Thiem had the suggestion of Nevanlinna himself. Nevanlinna also taught in Göttingen in the 1930s, and in Germany his students Egon Ullrich and Hans Wittich (in the 1940s private lecturer in Göttingen) worked on the reversal problem . In his 1947 work on the type problem, Le Van Thiem thanks Nevanlinna and Wittich for their collaboration.