Szolem Mandelbrojt

Szolem Mandelbrojt
File:Szolem Mandelbrojt.jpeg Szolem Mandelbrojt
Born	(1899-01-10)10 January 1899 Warsaw, Congress Poland
Died	Paris, France
Residence	Poland, France, U.S.
Nationality	Polish and French
Fields	Mathematician
Institutions	Collège de France Rice University University of Clermont-Ferrand University of Lille
Alma mater	Paris-Sorbonne University University of Kharkiv
Doctoral advisor	Jacques Hadamard
Doctoral students	Paul Malliavin Shmuel Agmon Hugh Brunk Vincent Cowling John Gergen Guy Johnson, Jr. Jean-Pierre Kahane Yitzhak Katznelson George Piranian Hans Jakob Reiter
Notes
He was the uncle of Benoit Mandelbrot.

Szolem Mandelbrojt (10 January 1899 – 23 September 1983) was a Polish-born French mathematician specialized in mathematical analysis. He was a Professor at Collège de France from 1938 to 1972, where he held the Chair of Analytical Mechanics and Celestial Mechanics.

Biography

Mandelbrojt was born on 10 January 1899 in Warsaw, Poland, in a Jewish family of Lithuanian descent. He was initially educated in Warsaw.

In 1919, he went to Kharkov, Ukraine and spent one year as a student of the Russian mathematician Bernstein.

In 1920, he emigrated to France and settled in Paris. In subsequent years, he attended the seminars of Hadamard, Lebesgue, Picard, and others.

In 1923, he received a doctorate from Paris-Sorbonne University on the theory of analytic continuation of Taylor series. His Ph.D. Advisor was Hadamard.

In 1924, he was awarded a Rockefeller Fellowship and spent almost two years in the United States.

In 1926, he received the French nationality.

In 1926-27, he spent one year as Assistant Professor at Rice Institute (now Rice University) in Houston, Texas.

In 1928, he came back to France and was appointed Assistant Professor at University of Lille.

In 1929, he became Full Professor at University of Clermont-Ferrand.

In December 1934, he co-founded the Bourbaki group. He remained a member until World War II.

In 1936, he helped several members of his family emigrate from Poland to France. One of them, his nephew Benoit Mandelbrot, was to discover the Mandelbrot set and coin the name fractal in the 1970s.

In 1938, he succeeded Hadamard at Collège de France and took up the Chair of Analytical Mechanics and Celestial Mechanics.

In 1939, he fought for France when the country was invaded by the Nazis.

In 1940, as many scientists helped by Louis Rapkine and the Rockefeller Foundation, he relocated to the United States and took up a position at Rice Institute.

In 1944, he joined the scientific committee of the Free French Forces in London, England.

In 1945, he moved back to France and resumed his professional activities at Collège de France, where he remained until his retirement in 1972.

In 1972, he was elected a member of the French Academy of Sciences.

He died in Paris, France on 23 September 1983.

Research

Even though Mandelbrojt was an early member of the Bourbaki group, and he did take part in a number of Bourbaki gatherings until the breakout of the war, his main research interests were actually quite remote from abstract algebra. As evidenced by his publications (see next), he focused on complex analysis and harmonic analysis, with an emphasis on Dirichlet series, lacunary series, and entire functions.

Rather than a Bourbakist, he is perhaps more accurately described as a follower of G. H. Hardy. Together with Norbert Wiener and Torsten Carleman, he can be viewed as a moderate modernizer of classical Fourier analysis.

Shmuel Agmon, Jean-Pierre Kahane, Yitzhak Katznelson, and Paul Malliavin are among his students.

External links

• .
• Szolem Mandelbrojt at the Mathematics Genealogy Project.
• Szolem Mandelbrojt at Collège de France.
• Szolem Mandelbrojt at Hathi Trust Digital Library.