Pál Turán

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Pál Turán, 1955

Pál Turán (also: Paul Turán ; born August 18, 1910 in Budapest ; † September 26, 1976 there ) was a Hungarian mathematician . He made contributions to number theory , group theory and approximation theory . In 1941 he proved a first fundamental result of the extremal graph theory , what is now known as Turan's theorem .

biography

Turán, the eldest son of a Jewish family, was considered a gifted student with high mathematical skills. During his studies at the Budapest Péter Pázmány University , he met Paul Erdős for the first time in September 1930 . As part of his doctorate, he published one of his first works with Erdős.

After receiving his doctorate in 1935, although he had already published seven publications by the end of 1935, he had great problems finding a job due to anti-Semitic tendencies in Hungary. In 1938 he finally found work as an assistant teacher for mathematics.

During the Second World War , Turán was repeatedly used for forced labor and imprisoned in a labor camp. Nevertheless, many of Turán's works date from this period. After the end of World War II he visited Denmark for 10 months and in 1947 spent six months at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton .

Paul Turán with Vera Sós Turán in Moscow in 1966

In Hungary Turán was elected to the Hungarian Academy of Sciences in 1948 and finally received a chair in algebra and number theory at the Loránd Eötvös University in Budapest in 1949 , which he held until his death in 1976.

In 1970 he was invited speaker at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Nice ( Diophantine approximation and analysis ) and in 1962 in Stockholm ( A comparative theory of prime numbers ).

He had been married to the mathematician Vera T. Sós since 1952 , with whom he had two children.

Scientific activity and achievements

Turán worked scientifically not least in the fields of number theory , analysis and discrete mathematics . With his name in the graph theory of Turán's theorem and the Turán graph is connected and in the analytical theory of numbers on it and Jonas Kubilius declining inequality of Turán-Kubilius .

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ L. Alpár: In memory of Paul Turán . In: Academic Press (Ed.): Journal of Number Theory . 13, No. 3, August 1981, pp. 271-278. doi : 10.1016 / 0022-314X (81) 90012-3 .
personal data
SURNAME Turán, Pál
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Turán, Paul
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Hungarian mathematician
DATE OF BIRTH August 18, 1910
PLACE OF BIRTH Budapest
DATE OF DEATH September 26, 1976
Place of death Budapest