Gábor Szegő

Gábor Szegő ( born January 20, 1895 in Kunhegyes in Hungary; † August 7, 1985 in Palo Alto) was a Hungarian mathematician who worked on Analysis.

Life and work

Szego studied in Budapest, Berlin (including with Ferdinand Georg Frobenius, Hermann Amandus Schwarz, Friedrich Schottky ) and Göttingen ( with David Hilbert, Edmund Landau, Alfréd hair). In World War I he was in the Austro- Hungarian Army in the artillery and later the air force, where he met Richard von Mises. In 1918 he received his doctorate at the University of Vienna with Leopold Fejér ( A limit theorem on Toeplitz determinants of a real function ). In 1921 he moved to Berlin, where he qualified as a Privatdozent was working with Isay Schur and von Mises and with George Polya 1925, the published two-volume tasks and theorems in analysis by Springer -Verlag. In 1926 he became the successor of Konrad Knopp professor in Königsberg. In 1934 he emigrated because he was persecuted as a Jew by the Nazis in the U.S. and went to Washington University in St. Louis. From 1938 he was a professor at Stanford University, where he remained until his retirement in 1966.

Szegö worked among others about Toeplitz matrices, Extremal problems, orthogonal polynomials. According to him, the Szego kernel, Szegö polynomials and Szegö limit formula which are named ( which arose out of a problem by Lars Onsager in the Ising model ). The Polya - Szego is generally considered (in the words of Richard Askey ) "best written and brauchbarstes problems - book in the history of mathematics ."

Szego was a member of Königsberg Learned Society, corresponding member of the Austrian (1960) and honorary member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. In 1928 he received the Hungarian Julius König Prize. He was married in 1919 and had two children.

Writings

• With George Pólya: Tasks and theorems of analysis. 2 volumes, Springer, 1925, 1972 ( many editions ). ISBN 354004874X (Volume 1) ISBN 3540054561 ( Volume 2 )
• With George Pólya: isoperimetric problem in mathematical physics. Princeton, Annals of Mathematical Studies.
• Orthogonal Polynomials. AMS, 1939, 1955.
• With Ulf Grenander: Toeplitz forms and their applications. Chelsea 1958
• Richard Askey (Editor): Collected Papers of Gábor Szegö. 3 volumes, Birkhauser 1982