Michael Fekete

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Fekete as rector and water carrier of the Hebrew University

Michael Fekete , also Mihály Fekete , as Michael Schwarz (born July 19, 1886 in Senta , Austria-Hungary , † May 13, 1957 in Jerusalem ) was a Hungarian-Israeli mathematician who dealt with analysis.

Life

Fekete received his doctorate in 1909 under Leopold Fejér at the University of Budapest (the first publications appeared in 1908), was then at the University of Göttingen with Edmund Landau from 1909 to 1910 and then completed his habilitation at the University of Budapest, where he was a private lecturer. His main occupation was a high school teacher. In addition, he gave private mathematics lessons, among other things John von Neumann was his student, with whom he also published together in 1922 (in von Neumann's first publication on the position of the zeros of certain minimum polynomials ). In 1928 he went to Israel and became a lecturer and from 1929 professor at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. At times he was head of the university's institute for mathematics, dean of natural sciences and from 1945 to 1948 rector of the university. In 1955 he retired.

The Fekete problem is named after him, which asks for the arrangement of a finite number of points on a manifold (for example the surface of a sphere) that minimize a given potential. It is one of the open problems in Stephen Smale 's list ( Smale problems ) for the successor to Hilbert's problems . Fekete considered the one-dimensional case and a logarithmic potential. With Gabor Szegö in 1933 he found an inequality between the coefficients of simple analytical functions (Fekete-Szegö inequality). Fekete polynomials are named after him, which have Legendre symbols as coefficients and have applications in number theory.

In 1955 he was invited speaker at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Amsterdam ( Transfinite Diameter and Fourier Series ). In 1955 he received the Israel Prize . His doctoral students include Menahem Max Schiffer , Michael Maschler, Zeev Nehari and Aryeh Dvoretzky .

In 1918 he married the mathematics teacher Dora Lenk, who died in 1922 and with whom he had two sons.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Fekete on the distribution of the roots in certain algebraic equations with integer coefficients , Mathematische Zeitschrift, Volume 17, 1923, pp. 228–249
  2. ^ Mathematics Genealogy Project
personal data
SURNAME Fekete, Michael
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Fekete, Mihály; Black, Michael
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Hungarian-Israeli mathematician
DATE OF BIRTH July 19, 1886
PLACE OF BIRTH Senta , Austria-Hungary
DATE OF DEATH May 13, 1957
Place of death Jerusalem