Aviezri Fraenkel

Aviezri Siegmund Fraenkel ( born June 7, 1929 in Munich) is an Israeli mathematician, who is particularly concerned with combinatorial game theory.

Life and work

Fraenkel's family left Germany in 1932 to escape the Nazis and went over Basel in 1939 to Israel. He began an apprenticeship as an electrician and then studied electrical engineering at the Technion, interrupted by activity for the Haganah and participation in the Israeli War of Independence. After graduation, he did his military service as an intelligence officer. In 1953 he was a member of the team under the direction of Gerald Estrin (who had worked on John von Neumann's computer at the Institute for Advanced Study and a professor at UCLA was ) that the first electronic computer ( Weizac ) in Israel built at the Weizmann Institute. In 1957 he was invited by Estrin at UCLA to do a doctorate in computer science ( Electrical Engineering). Because his mathematics minor subjects were not accepted for this he received his doctorate in 1961 at Ernst Gabor Straus instead in Mathematics ( Rational approximations to algebraic numbers ). As a post - graduate student, he was at the University of Oregon. In 1962 he returned to Israel and went to the Weizmann Institute, where he was initially responsible for the installation of a CDC mainframe. He became a professor at the Weizmann Institute (Department of computer science and applied mathematics ).

Fraenkel is also known for his Responsa Project, an extensive Hebrew electronic text collection ( in addition to the Bible and the Talmud and other writings from the more than 2000 years spanning Jewish diaspora includes ) at Bar- Ilan University, where he also developed search functions. He worked on it since 1962.

From Fraenkel comes an extensive bibliography of combinatorial game theory. In addition to mathematical games, he also deals with combinatorics, number theory and computer science.

He is married to the teacher Shaula Fraenkel since 1956 and has five sons and one daughter.

In 2005 he was awarded the Euler Medal, and in 2006 he received the Medal of the IEEE Weizac as a member of the team that built the Weizac. In 2007, the Responsa project the Israel Prize, for which he received in 1972 the spring Foundation Prize, and in 2007 he was Meritocrat of Rehovot ( Yakir Ha'ir ). In 1962 he was invited speaker at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Stockholm (A class of transcendental numbers ).