Leopoldo Nachbin

Leopoldo Nachbin (born January 7, 1922 in Recife , † April 3, 1993 in Rio de Janeiro ) was a Brazilian mathematician who dealt with functional analysis and topology. He was one of the founding members of the Instituto de Matemática Pura e Aplicada .

His father Jacob Nachbin was a Jewish immigrant from Poland who published a Yiddish newspaper in Rio and disappeared as a journalist in the Spanish Civil War in 1936. His mother Léa Drecht came from Austria. Nachbin went to school in Recife and was originally an engineer (graduated from the Rio Engineering School in 1943 as a civil engineer). He studied mathematics at the University of Rio with the Italian mathematicians Gabriele Mammana (a student of Mauro Picone ) and Luigi Sobrero (a student of Tullio Levi-Civita ) and in 1948 he became his freelance lecturer (according to the doctorate) with the dissertation Combination of metrizable and non-metrizable topologies . In 1948 he was one of the first Brazilian mathematicians to go to a US university, the University of Chicago . He also made contacts with André Weil , Marshall Stone and Jean Dieudonné , who were then in Chicago and visiting Brazil, as well as Laurent Schwartz . He was considered the most important mathematician in Brazil in the 1950s and early 1960s. He was a professor at the University of Rio and from 1964 at the University of Rochester , although he kept his professorship in Rio. He was a cosmopolitan with numerous international contacts and held many visiting professorships in Europe and America, for example in Paris (such as the Institut Henri Poincaré ), at the Institute for Advanced Study (1958), at Brandeis University and the University of Chicago.

Nachbin-Hewitt rooms are named after him and Edwin Hewitt .

He dealt with topological orders, topological vector spaces, harmonic analysis, general topology, approximation theory and holomorphism in infinitely dimensional spaces. He published in Portuguese, French and later mainly in English.

In 1967 he founded the Escola Latino-Americana de Matematica with Heitor Gurgulino de Souza. From 1948 he was editor of the Notas de Matemática (until 1976 at IMPA and then at North Holland in Amsterdam).

In 1962 he was invited speaker at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Stockholm ( Resultats recents et problemes de nature algebrique en theorie de l'approximation ).

In 1962 he received the Moinho Santista Prize (as the first mathematician in Brazil). In 1982 he received the Bernardo Houssay Prize from the Organization of American States.

He had been married to Maria da Graça Mousinho since 1956, with whom he had two sons and a daughter. One son is the Brazilian journalism professor and television presenter Luis Nachbin (* 1964). Another son André Nachbin is also a mathematician.

He was a member of the Brazilian Academy of Sciences (1950) and the Latin American Academy of Sciences when they were founded in 1963.

literature

• Obituary by CL da Silva Dias, Chaim Samuel Hönig, LA Da Justa Medeiros in Computational and Applied Mathematics, Volume 13, 1994, No. 3, p. 173

Fonts

• Haar Integral, Van Nostrand 1965
• Topology and Order, Krieger 1976
• Elements of approximation theory, Van Nostrand 1967, Krieger 1976
• Introduction to functional analysis, Banach spaces, and differential calculus, Dekker 1981
• Topology of spaces of holomorphic mappings, Springer Verlag 1969
• Holomorphic functions, domains of holomorphy and local properties, North Holland 1970
• A theorem of the Hahn-Banach type for linear transformations, Transactions American Mathematical Society, Volume 68, 1950, p. 28

Individual evidence

1. ↑ He was also a founding member of the Centro Brasileiro de Pesquisas Físicas (CBPF) in Rio, founded in 1949 .
2. ^ For example, this is what Paul Halmos said in his letter of recommendation for Nachbin's candidacy for a professorship at the University of Rochester. Obituary at the University of Rochester by Ralph Raimi 1993
3. ↑ By Maurice Weir in his monograph Nachbin-Hewitt Spaces , North Holland 1975