Raphaël Salem

Raphaël Salem ( born November 7, 1898 in Thessaloniki, † June 20, 1963 in Paris) was a French mathematician who was concerned with harmonic analysis.

Life and work

Salem was the son of a lawyer ( with Judeo- Spanish roots ), who specializes in international law. He went to the Italian school in Salonika ( which at that time belonged to Turkey ), and already in his parents' house was spoken Italian and French. 1913 the family moved to Paris, where the Lycée Condorcet visited Salem and then studied law at the Father desired. He is also a 1919 degree, but studied mathematics at Jacques Hadamard way already and made 1919 an additional Lizenziatsabschluss with the aim of starting an engineering degree. In 1921 he graduated from the École Centrale his degree in engineering, but then went into banking for the Banque de Paris et des Pays -Bas, in which he was in 1938 one of the senior managers. Only in his spare time, he could deal with mathematical work (via Fourier series ), where he was in contact with Arnaud Denjoy and later came to Paris with the Polish mathematician Józef Marcinkiewicz, the beginning of 1939. His publications have served as the basis for his submitted on the advice of Denjoy Promotion 1940. During this time he worked for the French general staff, including the Franco-British Coordinating Committee in 1940 in London. After the capitulation of France he went to the USA - his family had previously fled to Canada. In 1941 he was a lecturer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he worked with Antoni Zygmund and Norbert Wiener on Fourier series. He dealt particularly with the question of the uniqueness of the features described by Fourier series and turned one of the first probabilistic methods in his investigations of Fourier series. In 1945 he became assistant professor at MIT, 1946 Associate Professor and Professor in 1950. At the same time he went to the war, returned to France in 1950 was a professor at the University of Caen and forth between the MIT and France. This only ended in 1958, when he became professor at the Sorbonne.

The Salem Prize was donated by his widow for extraordinary achievements in the field of Fourier series in 1968. Named after Salem are introduced by him in the 1940s Salem numbers, which are related to the Pisot numbers.

He was married in 1923 and had two sons and a daughter.

Writings

• Essais sur les séries trigonométriques, Paris, Hermann 1940
• Algebraic Numbers and Fourier Analysis, Boston, Heath, 1963
• Oeuvres Mathématiques, Paris, 1967 ( with foreword by Zygmund )
• With Jean -Pierre Kahane: Ensembles parfaits et séries trigonométriques, Paris, Hermann, 1963, 1994