Otton Marcin Nikodým

Otton Marcin Nikodým (born August 13, 1887 in Zabłotów (then Galicia , now Ukraine ), † May 4, 1974 in Utica (New York) ) was a Polish mathematician .

Life

Nikodým was an orphan at an early age and grew up with his grandparents in Lemberg (and also for a short time in Vienna), who were of Italian and French origin. He studied mathematics and physics in Lviv with Marian Smoluchowski , Wacław Sierpiński and J. Puzyna with a degree for teachers and worked from 1911 to 1924 as a teacher at a grammar school in Cracow. In 1924 he received his doctorate at the University of Warsaw at the insistence of Sierpiński. In 1926/27 he was at the Sorbonne and in 1927 he completed his habilitation in Warsaw. From 1930 to 1945 Nikodým taught at the University of Warsaw. In 1945 he became a professor at the Technical University of Krakow. In 1946 he left Poland via Belgium and France and worked from 1948 to 1965 at the private Kenyon College in Gambier , Ohio . After his retirement, he moved to Utica, New York, in 1966, where he continued his research and died in 1974 after receiving an electric shock in 1971 and being in a coma for over 2 years. He is buried in Doylestown, Pennsylvania.

In 1919 he was one of the founders of the Polish Mathematical Society. For example, he was visiting professor at the University of Naples (1965).

In addition to Polish, he spoke English, French, German and Italian and also gave lectures in these languages.

Services

The name Nikodým is mainly connected to the theorem of Radon-Nikodým , which is significant in the theory of measurements , the general case of which Nikodým proved in 1930. In addition, he proved results in functional analysis and the solution theory of differential equations .

Nikodým wrote several textbooks, including an introduction to analysis with his wife (1936), about tensor theory (1938) and differential equations (1949). Planned further books on tensors and mechanics, which he had already completed, were destroyed in the Second World War. He wrote books on mathematics didactics (1930, 1938; as he was disappointed with the inclusion, he destroyed the third volume) and gave popular science lectures on the radio, which were also published as a book in 1946. Most recently he published a book on the mathematical foundations of quantum mechanics in 1966 .

Honors

In October 2016, a statue was erected in a park north of the cathedral in Krakow showing Stefan Banach and Otton Nikodým as students during a discussion on a park bench in 1916. Hugo Steinhaus noticed their discussion about the then new Lebesgue integral , who started a collaboration with them.

Fonts

• The Mathematical Apparatus for Quantum Theories, based on the Theory of Boolean lattices , Springer Verlag, Grundlehren der Mathematischen Wissenschaften 1966
• with János Aczél : Functional Equations of the Theory of Geometric Objects , monograph matematyczne 39, 1960

Web links

• John J. O'Connor, Edmund F. Robertson :  Otton Marcin Nikodým. In: MacTutor History of Mathematics archive .

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Ehrhard Behrends, A ceremony of Banach and Nikodym in Krakow