Pavel Samuilowitsch Urysohn

Pavel Urysohn

Pawel Samuilowitsch Urysohn , Russian Павел Самуилович Урысон , German and Paul Urysohn (January 22, ^jul. / 3. February 1898 ^greg. In Odessa , now Ukraine ; † 17th August 1924 in Batz-sur-Mer , France ) was a Russian Mathematician who dealt mainly with set theoretic topology .

life and work

From 1915 he studied mathematics at the Lomonossow University in Moscow with Nikolai Lusin and Dmitri Fjodorowitsch Jegorow , after he had started with physics and published a physical essay in the first year. In 1919 he made his diploma and habilitated in 1921 with a thesis on integral equations, after which he had a lectureship at Moscow University. An important class of nonlinear integral equations has since borne his name.

Inspired by some of Jegorov's questions, he dealt with the concept of dimension in set-theoretical topology without knowing the work of the famous topologist Brouwer (1913). He published the theory he developed in the files of the French Academy (Comptes rendus) in 1922 and in the Polish “Fundamenta mathematica”. Later, his friend Pawel Alexandrow , with whom he visited Göttingen from 1923 to 1924, recognized the equivalence with the theory of Karl Menger . On their last trip to Western Europe in 1924, he and Alexandrow visited David Hilbert in Göttingen, Felix Hausdorff in Bonn and Brouwer in Amsterdam . Then the two rented a holiday home in Brittany , where Urysohn drowned in rough seas during one of their bathing trips in the Atlantic. He had swum out with Alexandrov around 5 p.m. on a Sunday, and both wanted to turn back because of the strong waves. Alexandrov made it to the shore, fetched the lifeless, floating Urysohn on a rope that a local resident had thrown him, secured from the sea, but the attempts at resuscitation were unsuccessful. He is buried in Batz-sur-Mer. Alexandrov published the last works of his friend. Urysohn had last worked on the theory of metric spaces , where some fundamental results come from him. At Work On the Metrology Problem , he had worked all day on the day he died before going swimming.

According to Jean-Michel Kantor and Loren Graham, Urysohn was homosexual and had a relationship with Alexandrow. Both got to know each other better at a Beethoven concert in the Bolshoi Theater in 1921, on the eve of Alexandrow's wedding, whose marriage did not last long.

Fonts

Sur une classe d'equations integrales non lineaires , Mat. Sb. 31 (1923) 256-255
Mémoire sur les multiplicités Cantoriennes. In: Fundamenta Mathematica.
Part 1 , Volume 7, 1925, pp. 30-137 (PDF file; 5.91 MB).
Part 2 , Volume 8, 1926, pp. 225–351 (PDF file; 6.84 MB).
On the metrization problem. In: Mathematical Annals. , Volume 94, 1925, pp. 309-315. ( online )
About the metrization of compact topological spaces. In: Mathematical Annals. 1924. ( online )

literature

Detlef Gronau Paul Urysohn in Batz sur Mer , Mitteilungen DMV, Volume 18, 2010, p. 236
PS Alexandrov Pages from an Autobiography , Part 1,2, Russian Mathematical Surveys, Volume 34, 1979, pp. 267-304, Volume 35, 1980, pp. 315-358
DE Cameron on the death of Urysohn with photos

Web links

Remarks

↑ He only found out about it in Göttingen and immediately found a mistake in his work, which impressed Brouwer.
^ Graham, Kantor, Naming Infinity, Harvard University Press 2009, p. 174

personal data
SURNAME	Urysohn, Pavel Samuilowitsch
ALTERNATIVE NAMES	Urysohn, Pavel; Urysohn, Paul; Павел Самуилович Урысон
BRIEF DESCRIPTION	Russian mathematician
DATE OF BIRTH	February 3, 1898
PLACE OF BIRTH	Odessa , Ukraine
DATE OF DEATH	17th August 1924
Place of death	Batz-sur-Mer , France

[1] He only found out about it in Göttingen and immediately found a mistake in his work, which impressed Brouwer.

[2] Graham, Kantor, Naming Infinity, Harvard University Press 2009, p. 174