Michael Fekete

Michael Fekete, also Mihály Fekete, ( born July 19, 1886 in Senta, then Austria - Hungary, † May 13, 1957 in Jerusalem ) was an Israeli -Hungarian mathematician who worked on Analysis.

Fekete was born in 1909 his doctorate under Leopold Fejér at the University of Budapest (where first publications appeared in 1908 ), was followed from 1909 to 1910 at the University of Göttingen with Edmund Landau and habilitated then at the University of Budapest, where he was a lecturer. His main job was a high school teacher. He also gave private math lessons, including John von Neumann was his pupil, with whom he also published together in 1922 ( in von Neumann 's first publication about the location of the zeros of certain polynomials min ). In 1928, he moved to Israel and became a lecturer and in 1929 professor at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. At times, he was head of the Institute of Mathematics of the University, Dean of Natural Sciences and from 1945 to 1948 Rector of the University. In 1955 he went into retirement.

According to him, the Fekete problem is designated, (for example, spherical surface ) asks for the arrangement of a finite number of points on a manifold to minimize a given potential. It is one of the open problems in the Stephen Smale 's list for the succession of Hilbert's problems .. With Gabor Szego 1933 he found an inequality between the coefficients of simple analytical functions ( Fekete - Szegö inequality). After him also Fekete polynomials are named, have as coefficients the Legendre symbols and have applications in number theory.

In 1955 he was invited speaker at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Amsterdam ( Transfinite Diameter and Fourier Series). In 1955 he was awarded the Israel Prize. His doctoral include Menahem Max Schiffer, Michael Maschler, Zeev Nehari and Aryeh Dvoretzky.

He married in 1918 the mathematics teacher Dora Lenk, who died in 1922 and with whom he had two sons.