Gregory Chudnovsky

Gregory Chudnovsky Volfovich (also Choodnovsky; Ukrainian Григорій Вольфович Чудновський; Russian Григорий Вольфович Чудновский; born April 17, 1952 in Kiev) is an American mathematician who deals with number theory.

Chudnovsky, whose mother was a civil engineer and moved with her sons to New York, grew up in the Ukraine. While still a high school student, he published his first mathematical work 16 years and replaced with 17 years of Hilbert's 10th problem, about the same time as Yuri Matijassewitsch, who was known for his work in 1972. Chudnovsky studied as his brother David Chudnovsky, with whom he worked closely in the sequence, at Kiev University (graduate 1974) and received his doctorate in 1975 at the Mathematics Department of the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences. Gregory Chudnovsky is to be ensured by a disease severely disabled ( myasthenia gravis ), and to better medical care, requested the family in 1976, emigration, after which they were lost their jobs and subjected to persecution by the KGB, for example, was on one occasion his mother on the street beat. However, the family received support from foreign mathematicians such as Edwin Hewitt, with the Chudnovsky 1976 worked in Kiev and the mobilized a U.S. Senator in the matter, and they also received support from Andrei Sakharov. In 1977, she was to leave for New York, where the brothers worked at Columbia University (until the 1990s only as a Senior Research Scientist ). In 1981 Gregory Chudnovsky for five years, a highly doped MacArthur Fellowship. Despite efforts of influential mathematicians (Herbert Robbins wrote on the matter in 1986 to the members of the National Academy of Sciences, and Mark Kac and Lipman Bers tried in vain private sponsorship money for a chair raise ) got the Chudnovskys not initially their abilities appropriate permanent job at a New York or ever at a U.S. university, which was partially attributed to the disability Gregory Chudnovskys and that they just wanted to fill such a post together.

He is currently (2009) as his brother Professor at the Polytechnic Institute of New York University. They were achieved for several records in the calculation of Pi, which they partly on home-built supercomputers in her apartment (called " M zero", initially with 8 processors, it reached to 2 gigaflops processing power ) in the early 1990s known. Previously, she had drawn attention to himself in the spring of 1989, when they set up with the calculation of 480 million digits of Pi a new record, in an international contest organized at that time, the previously led the team of Japanese Yasumasa Canada from the University of Tokyo, one Hitachi supercomputer used. Canada countered shortly thereafter with over 1 billion points, which was surpassed by the Chudnovskys at the end of 1989. In mid-1991, they calculated Pi to 2 billion 260 million digits and provided the invoices for the time being.

For their calculations of Pi, they used one of them developed algorithm ( Chudnovsky algorithm), a formula Pi as hypergeometric series indicates similar to those already found Ramanujan.

After their first home supercomputer they were also involved in other computer projects. With Saed Younis ( then a student at MIT ) and the IBM supercomputer architect Monty Denneau they built shortly after the number-theoretic calculations built specifically for Little Fermat computer at MIT. Gregory Chudnovsky was primarily interested in discovering patterns in the sequence of digits of Pi ( but he found no statistically significant pattern).

Chudnovsky made ​​since the 1970s, important contributions to the theory Transcendental numbers and proved among other things, the transcendence of the value of the gamma function at the point 1/4.

Your help in the restoration of the Unicorn Rugs of the Metropolitan Museum of Art ( in the digital photo documentation ) was the subject of a PBS television film in 2003

The brothers were among others the French Prix Peccot - Vimont, several Guggenheim Fellowships, the price of the Moscow Mathematical Society. In 1994, Gregory Chudnovsky the George Pólya Prize. In 1978 he was invited speaker at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Helsinki ( Algebraic independence of values ​​of algebraic and elliptic functions).

In 1982, the brothers were co-editor of the Collected Works of Sakharov in Dekker.

Writings

• Contributions to the theory of transcendental numbers, American Mathematical Society 1984
• Editor David Chudnovsky: Seminar on the Riemann problem, Complete integrability and Arithmetic Applications, IHES and Columbia University 1979/80, Springer 1982
• Editor David Chudnovsky: Classical and quantum models of arithmetic problems, New York, Marcel Dekker 1984
• Editor David Chudnovsky: Search theory -some recent developments, Dekker 1989