Theodore Motzkin

Theodore Samuel Motzkin (born 26 March 1908 in Berlin, † December 15, 1970 in Los Angeles ) was a mathematician of German-Jewish descent. The Motzkin numbers and Motzkin polynomial, and the Fourier - Motzkin elimination is named after him.

Motzkin was an extremely well-read, more flexible and creative mathematician who seemingly distant disciplines combined imaginative by its great functional diversity. His pioneering work in part come from the fields of linear programming, convex geometry, combinatorics, algebraic geometry, number theory or complex analysis.

He was the first who proved the existence of principal ideal rings that are not Euclidean rings; was his original example.

Biography

Motzkins father, Leo Motzkin, who had lived in Germany since 1880, was a trained mathematician and an important forerunner of the Zionist movement. Theodore Motzkin showed early his extraordinary talent for mathematics. In Berlin he attended the University of early age of 15.

This was followed by studies at the universities of Göttingen, Paris and Berlin. He completed his thesis on algebraic structures, supervised by Isay Schur in Berlin. For the promotion of Motzkin went to the University of Basel, where he was in 1934, supervised by Alexander Markovich Ostrowski, with a dissertation on linear inequalities doctorate.

In 1935 Motzkin was appointed to the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. During the Second World War he worked as a cryptographer for the British government. During this time he married Naomi Orenstein, their three sons were born in Jerusalem. He helped to develop the mathematical terminology of the Hebrew language.

1948 emigrated Motzkin in the U.S. and spent two years at Harvard University. One of the first published work there is to prove the existence of principal ideal rings that are not Euclidean rings.

1950 Motzkin was appointed to the Institute for Numerical Analysis at the University of California, Los Angeles ( UCLA), ten years later he became a full professor.