Gheorghe Vrânceanu

Gheorghe Vranceanu (* June 30, 1900 in Valea Hogei, † April 27, 1979 in Bucharest ) was a Romanian mathematician.

Life and work

Vranceanu was the son of poor peasants. His talent came to the village school teacher who made ​​sure that he could attend the high school. From 1919, he studied with a scholarship mathematics at the University of Iasi, where he assistant at the Mathematical Seminar in 1921 and 1922 received his degree. In 1923 he went to the University of Göttingen to David Hilbert and then to the University of Rome, where he received his doctorate in 1924 at Tullio Levi -Civita ( Sopra una teorema di Weierstrass e le sue applicazioni alla stabilita ). He returned to Iasi. His discovery of non- holonomic spaces ( now named after him) made ​​him in 1926 quickly became known. He became a lecturer in Iasi and went in 1927/28 with a Rockefeller scholarship to Paris, where he worked with Elie Cartan, and the United States at the Harvard University and Princeton University, where he made the acquaintance of George David Birkhoff and Oswald Veblen. Although he was asked an academic career in the United States in view, he returned to Romania. In 1929 he became a professor at the University of Cernauti and 1939 professor at the University of Bucharest, as the successor of Gheorghe Titeica. In 1948 he was Chair of geometry and topology. In 1970 he retired, but remained mathematically active.

His scientific focus was on the geometry ( in which he conducted research in many areas ) and their applications in mechanics. He wrote several textbooks, including on differential geometry (the book was translated into French and German ).

In 1928 he led at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Bologna nonholonomic manifolds a ( Parallelisme Courbure et dans une variété non holonomic ), in the present definition, smooth manifolds provided with a smooth distribution, which is not integrable in general. Around the same time, this was done by John L. Synge and other important contributions came soon after the Russian mathematician V. Vagner and Jan Arnoldus Schouten. It arose from the need to find a geometric analogue for nonholonomic mechanical systems.

He was also politically active and in 1944 one of the founders of a party that was against a further fight against the Soviet Union.

He was editor of the Revue de Mathématiques Pures et Roumaine Appliquées and attempted to international contacts through the organization of conferences worldwide and visiting professorships. He wrote some 300 scientific papers.

In 1946 he became a corresponding and 1955 full member of the Romanian Academy of Sciences, the Mathematics Department he chaired from 1964. He was an honorary doctorate from the University of Bologna and the University of Iasi. In 1970 he became a member of the Royal Flemish Academy of Sciences in Brussels. In 1975 he became vice-president of the International Mathematical Union.

Vranceanu was involved in the publication of the collected works of Elie Cartan.

His doctoral include Kostake Teleman and Henri Moscovici.

Writings

• Opera matematica, 4 volumes, Bucharest 1969-1977
• Les espaces non holonomic, Paris, Gauthier -Villars 1936
• Interprétation géométrique of the processus probabilistiques continus, Gauthier -Villars 1969
• Lectures on Differential Geometry, Berlin, Akademie Verlag, 1961 ( translator Max Pinl from the French original in Romanian in 4 volumes )