Tibor Radó
Tibor Radó (born June 2, 1895 in Budapest , Austria-Hungary , † December 12, 1965 in New Smyrna Beach , Florida ) was a Hungarian mathematician , known for his work on minimal surfaces and Turing machines .
Life
Tibor Radó went to school in Budapest and began studying engineering at the University of Budapest in 1913 . After the outbreak of World War I , he was drafted into the Austro-Hungarian army in 1915 and was taken prisoner by Russia in 1916, where he met the mathematician Eduard Helly , who taught him. It was not until 1920 that he was able to escape from the Siberian prison camp near Tobolsk , return to Hungary after a detour via the arctic regions of Siberia and continue his training with a study of mathematics in Szeged with Alfréd Haar and Frigyes Riesz . There he did his doctorate in 1922 under Riesz and then worked as an assistant and private lecturer. In 1928 he was on a Rockefeller scholarship with Constantin Carathéodory at the Ludwig Maximilians University in Munich and with Paul Koebe and Leon Lichtenstein at the University of Leipzig and from 1929 at Harvard University . Finally, in 1930 he received a chair in mathematics at Ohio State University in Columbus (Ohio) , which he held until his retirement in 1964. In 1942 he was visiting professor at the University of Chicago . From 1946 to 1948 he was dean of the faculty in Columbus.
In 1950 Radó was invited speaker at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and lectured on "Applications of area theory in analysis". In 1953 he became vice president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science . In 1952 he gave the MAA's first Earle Raymond Hedrick Lectures . He was the editor of the American Journal of Mathematics.
Radó made important contributions to the calculus of variations , potential theory , partial differential equations , differential geometry , measure theory and topology . In 1925, in the article "About the Concept of the Riemann Surface", he proved that every topological surface can be triangulated, thus setting the keystone for classifying surfaces, which Dehn and Heegaard had previously worked out for triangulated surfaces .
In calculability theory, he came up with the idea of the busy beaver and the associated, clearly defined, but not calculable Radó function . Today he is awarded the solution of the plateau problem independently of Jesse Douglas (1930). He used completely different methods (approximation by conformal mapping) than Douglas.
Radó had been married since 1924 and had two children; he is buried in Bellevue Memorial Park in Daytona Beach , Florida.
Fonts
- On the concept of the Riemann surface , Acta Scientarum Mathematicarum Universitatis Szegediensis, 1925.
- The problem of least area and the problem of Plateau , Mathematische Zeitschrift Vol. 32, 1930, p. 763
- On the problem of Plateau , Springer-Verlag, Berlin, results of mathematics and their border areas, 1933, 1951, 1971.
- Subharmonic Functions , Springer, Results of Mathematics and its Frontier Areas, 1937.
- Length and Area , AMS Colloquium Lectures, 1948.
- with Paul V. Reichelderfer : Continuous transformations in analysis - with an introduction to algebraic topology , Springer 1955.
- On Non-Computable Functions , Bell System Technical Journal 41/1962.
- Computer studies of Turing machine problems , Journal of the ACM 12/1965.
Web links
- John J. O'Connor, Edmund F. Robertson : Tibor Radó. In: MacTutor History of Mathematics archive .
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Radó, Tibor |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | Hungarian-American mathematician |
| DATE OF BIRTH | June 2, 1895 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Budapest |
| DATE OF DEATH | December 12, 1965 |
| Place of death | New Smyrna Beach , Florida |