Theodore Motzkin

Theodore Samuel Motzkin (born March 26, 1908 in Berlin , † December 15, 1970 in Los Angeles ) was an American mathematician of Russian descent.

biography

Motzkin's father, Leo Motzkin , who had lived in Germany since 1880, was a trained mathematician and an important pioneer of the Zionist movement . Theodore Motzkin showed his extraordinary talent for mathematics early on. In Berlin he attended university at the age of 15.

Studies at the Universities of Göttingen, Paris and Berlin followed. In Berlin he wrote his diploma thesis on algebraic structures, supervised by Issai Schur . For his doctorate, Motzkin went to the University of Basel , where he received his doctorate in 1934, supervised by Alexander Markowitsch Ostrowski , with a dissertation on linear inequalities.

In 1935 Motzkin was appointed to the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. During the Second World War he worked there as a cryptographer for the British government. During this time he married Naomi Orenstein, their three sons were born in Jerusalem, including the history philosopher Gabriel Motzkin . He helped develop the mathematical terminology of the Hebrew language.

In 1948 Motzkin emigrated to the USA and spent two years at Harvard University . One of the first work published there is the proof of the existence of main ideal rings that are not Euclidean rings .

In 1950 Motzkin was appointed to the Institute of Numerics at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA); ten years later he became a full professor there.

plant

The Motzkin numbers and the Motzkin polynomial as well as the Fourier-Motzkin elimination are named after him.

His work comes from the fields of linear programming, convex geometry ( Motzkin's theorem ), combinatorics, algebraic geometry, number theory or function theory.

He was the first to prove the existence of major ideal rings that are not Euclidean rings ; was his original example. ${\displaystyle \mathbb {Z} \left[{\frac {1+{\sqrt {-19}}}{2}}\right]}$

literature

• Joachim Schwermer:  Motzkin, Theodor Samuel. In: New German Biography (NDB). Volume 18, Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 1997, ISBN 3-428-00199-0 , p. 231 f. ( Digitized version ).

Web links

• John J. O'Connor, Edmund F. Robertson :  Theodore Motzkin. In: MacTutor History of Mathematics archive .