|
Romanian professor
It can be strange, but also in mathematics may occur, sometimes unusual occurrences. This was the case with a theorem proved by the Romanian mathematician Gabriel Sudan and which has been long time attributed to another foreign scientist.
Sudan Gabriel was born in Bucharest in 1899, following high school "Mihai Viteazul" and the Faculty of his hometown. He was strongly influenced by his teachers Dimitrie Pompeiu and Traian Lalescu. Having remarkable mathematical skills, he was sent to specialize in modern mathematics in Göttingen (1922-1926) - then a world center of mathematics which attracted value mathematicians from everywhere.
Sudan achieved here in 1925, a Ph.D. degree, but what is perhaps more important, lives in an atmosphere of intense creative activity around some leaders of modern mathematics, David Hilbert – his supervisor for the thesis. Years 20s of XX century were years of intense creativity and whole areas of mathematics were initiated at Gottingen. A problem intense studied then was the issue of so-called recursive functions, ie functions that could be calculated one from another, by given rules.
A special class is the so-called primitive recursive functions. Sudan demonstrated one of the special properties of recursive functions. He published his results, but the demonstration has been wrongly assigned to mathematician FW Ackermann. This situation lasted half a century, until, through investigations undertaken by the Romanian mathematicians Solomon Marcus and Cristian Calude, truth has been restored.
Returned home after obtaining Ph.D. degree, Sudan worked in Bucharest University also at the Institute of Mathematics until the end of its life (1977). His mathematical activity continued in the same field as his doctoral studies. Sudan firstly held the course about set theory in Romania during 1929-1930; his contributions are varied, ranging from number theory to fractions geometrization, but his focus was the difficult problem of sets theory.
Sudan had an original mathematical thinking; he managed to discover deep mathematical truths in apparently simple, trivial problems.
A complex personality, Gabriel Sudan was an excellent teacher, close to his students, who valued both clarity and elegance of its exposure, as well as passion for research which he could transmit them. Equally loved philosophy, literature and music, he had a passion for Enesco, Beethoven and Wagner. His life was related to his lessons, which kept them warmly, to the delight of his listeners.
|
| |
|
|
variant spelling:
Sudan, Gabriel
|
| |
|
|
|
Curriculum vitae
|
|
|
* 1899
|
Bucuresti
|
born
|
|
1922 - 1926
|
Gottingen
|
|
|
1925
|
Gottingen
|
|
|
1929 - 1977
|
Bucuresti
|
|
|
† 1977
|
Bucuresti
|
died
|
|
|
Newsletter
DMG-Lib
Europeana
