Weniamin Fyodorowitsch Kagan

Weniamin Fjodorowitsch Kagan ( Russian Вениамин Фёдорович Каган ; born March 9, 1869 in Šiauliai , then Kovno Governorate , Russian Empire ; † May 8, 1953 in Moscow ) was a Russian mathematician .

Kagan was born into a poor Jewish family. In 1871 the family moved to Yekaterinoslav , where he grew up. Kagan studied at Odessa University from 1887 , but was expelled from the university as a politically active student in 1889. In 1892 he graduated from Kiev University after self- studies. He continued his studies at the University of Saint Petersburg with Andrei Andrejewitsch Markow and Konstantin Posse, where he received his doctorate in 1895 (candidate) and habilitated in 1907 (called "doctor" in Russia). From 1897 he was a lecturer and from 1904 professor in Odessa and from 1923 professor of geometry at the Lomonossow University in Moscow. In 1952 he retired.

Kagan was the founder of a school of differential geometry in Russia and introduced the tensor calculus into differential geometry in Russia . He also dealt with the axiomatization of Euclidean geometry and the history of geometry , where he u. a. published a five-volume edition of the works of Nikolai Ivanovich Lobachevsky from 1946 to 1951 . In 1903 he simplified Max Dehn's solution to Hilbert's third problem considerably.

In 1943 he received the Soviet State Prize. He founded the scientific publishing house Mathesis in Odessa and was head of the mathematics and natural science department of the Great Soviet Encyclopedia.

His doctoral students include Pyotr Raschewski , Alexander Petrowitsch Norden , Viktor Wladimirowitsch Wagner and Isaak Jaglom . The physicist Igor Tamm was also one of his students in 1921/2. Kagan is the maternal grandfather of the mathematician Jakow Sinai and Grigori Isaakowitsch Barenblatt .

In 1994 the asteroid (4366) Venikagan was named after him.

Fonts

• Basics of Geometry , 2 volumes, Odessa 1905, 1907 (Russian)
• N. Lobachevsky , Moscow, Leningrad 1948 (Russian, French translation Moscow 1974)
• About the transformation of the polyhedra , Mathematische Annalen, Vol.57, 1903, p.421 (on the 3rd Hilbert problem)

literature

• Siegfried Gottwald , Hans-Joachim Illgauds, Karl-Heinz Schlote (Hrsg.): Lexicon of important mathematicians . Bibliographisches Institut, Leipzig 1990, ISBN 3-323-00319-5 .
• Joseph W. Dauben , Christoph J. Scriba (Ed.): Writing the history of mathematics. Its historical development . Birkhäuser, Basel et al. 2002, ISBN 3-7643-6167-0 , ( Science networks 27).

Web links

• John J. O'Connor, Edmund F. Robertson :  Weniamin Fjodorowitsch Kagan. In: MacTutor History of Mathematics archive .
• Russian biography ( Memento from September 29, 2007 in the Internet Archive )