Raphaël Salem

Raphaël Salem (born November 7, 1898 in Saloniki , † June 20, 1963 in Paris ) was a French mathematician who dealt with harmonic analysis.

Salem tombstone in Varengeville-sur-Mer

Life

Salem was the son of a lawyer (with Jewish-Spanish roots) who specialized in international law. He went to the Italian school in Saloniki (which at that time belonged to Turkey), and Italian and French were already spoken in his parents' house. In 1913 the family moved to Paris, where Salem attended the Lycée Condorcet and then studied law at his father's request. He graduated from it in 1919, but was also studying mathematics with Jacques Hadamard and in 1919 also graduated with a degree with the aim of starting an engineering degree. In 1921 he graduated from the École Centrale as an engineer, but then went into banking at Banque de Paris et des Pays-Bas, where he became a senior manager in 1938. Only in his free time could he deal with mathematical work (on Fourier series ), where he had contacts with Arnaud Denjoy and later with the Polish mathematician Józef Marcinkiewicz , who came to Paris in early 1939. His publications served as the basis for his doctorate, submitted on the advice of Denjoy in 1940. During this time he worked for the French General Staff, including in the Franco-British coordination committee in 1940 in London. After France surrendered, he went to the USA - his family had fled to Canada before. In 1941 he became a lecturer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology , where he worked on Fourier series with Antoni Zygmund and Norbert Wiener . He dealt particularly with the question of the uniqueness of the functions described by Fourier series and was one of the first to apply probabilistic methods in his investigations into Fourier series. In 1945 he became an assistant professor at MIT, an associate professor in 1946 and a professor in 1950. At the same time he went back to France after the war, became a professor at the University of Caen in 1950 and commuted between MIT and France. That only ended in 1958 when he became a professor at the Sorbonne . In 1952 Salem was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences .

The Salem Prize was donated in 1968 by his widow for extraordinary achievements in the field of the Fourier series. The Salem numbers that he introduced in the 1940s , which are related to the Pisot numbers , are named after Salem .

He had been married since 1923 and had two sons and a daughter.

Fonts

• Essais sur les séries trigonométriques, Paris, Hermann 1940
• Algebraic Numbers and Fourier Analysis, Boston, Heath, 1963
• Œuvres mathématiques, Paris 1967 (with foreword by Zygmund)
• with Jean-Pierre Kahane : Ensembles parfaits et séries trigonométriques, Paris, Hermann, 1963, 1994

Individual evidence

1. ↑ However, his mother and sister together with husband and son died in the concentration camp. His father died in Paris in 1940.

Web links

• Biography at McTutor