Abram Samoilovitch Besicovitch

Abram Samoilowitsch Besikowitsch, Russian: Абрам Самойлович Безикович, in English usually as AS Besicovitch cited (born 24 January 1891 in Berdyansk, † November 2, 1970 in Cambridge, England) was a British mathematician Karaim - Russian origin.

Life

Besikowitsch was born the fourth of six children of parents who belonged to the Jewish sect of the Turkic Karaites. He studied mathematics in St. Petersburg in Andrei A. Markov, where he graduated in 1912. He married in 1916; his wife was Orthodox Jew and was allowed to marry a Karaite, so he went over for the marriage license to the Orthodox Church. Besikowitsch was in the midst of revolutionary turmoil in 1917, Professor in 1919 in Perm and St. Petersburg. In 1924 he went without his wife ( married in 1928 divorced, the same year he married again a Russian who he knew from Perm ) with a Rockefeller scholarship to Copenhagen to Harald Bohr, under whose influence he changed his field of probability theory to almost periodic functions. In 1925 he visited Godfrey Harold Hardy in Oxford, who gave him a job in Liverpool. In 1927 he went to Cambridge, where he was in 1950 successor of John Edensor Littlewood as Rouse Ball Professor. In 1958 he retired, held until 1966 guest lecturer at various universities in the U.S. and returned afterwards at Trinity College back in Cambridge.

Besikowitsch is mainly for the development of the theory of fractals known, ie amounts of non-integer dimension ( Hausdorff dimension Besikowitsch, introduced by Felix Hausdorff in 1918, from around 1930 Besikowitsch removed). In 1925, he solved the Kakeya needle problem (named after the Japanese mathematician Soichi Kakeya ) by proving that the area swept by a 360 degree rotating line of length 1 region may be arbitrarily small. Even before that (1919) he had shown that Besikowitsch sets ( containing a unit distance in any orientation ) can have arbitrarily small measure. A lecture by Besikowitsch on the Kakeya needle problem was filmed by the Mathematical Association of America in the 1960s.

Other fields were the real analysis, measure theory and the theory of almost periodic functions. He often trod this surprising and original ways.

Besikowitsch was inducted into the Royal Society, in 1952, the Sylvester Medal awarded him in 1934 as a member ( "Fellow" ). He received in 1950 the De Morgan Medal of the London Mathematical Society.

The asteroid ( 16953 ) Besicovitch was named after him.

Quotes

• The reputation of a mathematician is based on the number of erroneous evidence he has given, A mathematician 's reputation rests on the number of bad proofs He Has givenName

Writings

• Almost periodic functions, Dover 1954
• The Kakeya problem, American Mathematical Monthly, Volume 70, 1963, S.697