Pavel Alexandrov
Pavel Sergeevich Aleksandrov, Russian Павел Сергеевич Александров, English Alexandrov, German and Paul Alexandroff (born 25 Apriljul / May 7 1896greg in Bogorodsk, .. † November 16, 1982 in Moscow) was a Russian mathematician who mainly dealt with topology.
Life and work
He graduated from the Lomonosov Moscow State University with Dmitri Yegorov (1869-1931) and Nikolai Luzin (1883-1950), the head of a large school of real analysis. Together with his friend Pavel Urysohn (1898-1924), also a pioneer in topology, he visited 1923-1924 Göttingen, where he studied with Emmy Noether, David Hilbert and Richard Courant and worked with them. After the fatal swimming accident of his friend Urysohn on the French Atlantic coast in 1924 he published his works. After receiving his doctorate in 1927, he was with Heinz Hopf, with whom he has worked closely in Göttingen until 1928 at the Princeton University. From 1929 he was professor at the Lomonosov University in Moscow and at the local Steklov Institute. In 1953 he was elected to the Soviet Academy of Sciences.
Aleksandrov worked in general topology and set theory, but is best known as a pioneer of algebraic topology, where he received important suggestions for an abstract group-theoretical treatment of Emmy Noether. With Heinz Hopf in 1935 he wrote the book "Topology", one of the first textbooks about this area. The Einpunktkompaktifizierung a locally compact space is named after him also Alexandrov compactification of the space.
Among his students Alexander Kurosch, Lev Pontryagin and Andrei Tikhonov.
Alexandrov was a lifelong close friend of Andrei Kolmogorov and both bought a house in 1935 in Moscow, where she also received many foreign mathematicians.
He had quite a sense of humor, as the following memory of Kurt Reidemeister after his visit to the Euler celebration of the German Academy of Sciences in Berlin on 21 March 1957 testifies:
" The second speaker was the head of the delegation of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR, Professor Alexandroff from Moscow - who incidentally spent several years as a young lecturer at Göttingen and imaginary in a personal conversation that carefree days with heat. To characterize Euler, Alexandroff was linked to the interaction of skill and understanding and explained this to a pun of physicians about physician. The surgeons, it is said there, understand little, but can do much; the inner physicians understand much, but little can and psychiatrists understand everything, but can not. The purpose of this tripartite division, he then went before the now quite amused solemn assembly, Euler was a surgeon. Euler was a rounder, more precisely, a brilliant computer both on the material of the numbers as well as the material of the formulas. "
In 1954 he gave a plenary lecture at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Amsterdam (From the set-theoretic topology of the last twenty years).
Works
- Introduction to group theory. 11th edition. Harri German, 2001.
- Textbook of set theory. 7th edition. Harri German, 2001.
- Section Simplest basic concepts of topology in David Hilbert, Stephan Cohn- Vossen: Descriptive geometry. 2nd edition. Springer Verlag, 1996.
- Editor and co-author of Encyclopedia of Elementary Mathematics, 4 vols, German Academic Publishers, Berlin (East), 1977-1980
- Editor and co-author of The Hilbert problems, Verlag Harri German ( Ostwald classic Bd.252 ) in 1998, first in 1971
- With Heinz Hopf Topology, Volume 1, Springer, 1935, new in 1974