Tibor Radó

Tibor Radó ( born June 2, 1895 in Budapest, † December 12, 1965 in New Smyrna Beach, Florida) was a Hungarian mathematician, known for his work on minimal surfaces and Turing machines.

Life

Tibor Radó went to Budapest to school and he moved in 1913 at the University of Budapest to study engineering. After the outbreak of the First World War, he was drafted in 1915 in the Austro-Hungarian army and fell into Russian captivity in 1916, where he met the mathematician Eduard Helly, who taught him. Not until 1920 that he was able to escape from the Siberian prison camp near Tobolsk, returning after a detour via the Arctic regions of Siberia to Hungary and continue his education with a degree in mathematics in Szeged at Alfréd hair and Frigyes Riesz. There he received his doctorate in 1922 Riesz and then worked as an assistant and lecturer. In 1928, he was a Rockefeller Fellowship at Constantin Carathéodory at the Ludwig- Maximilians- University of Munich and at Paul Koebe and Leon Lichtenstein at Leipzig University and since 1929 at Harvard University. Finally, he received in 1930 a chair of mathematics at Ohio State University in Columbus (Ohio ), where he remained until his retirement in 1964. In 1942 he was a visiting professor at the University of Chicago. 1946 to 1948 he was Dean of the Faculty in Columbus.

Radó was 1950 Invited Speaker at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and carried on "Applications of area theory in analysis" before. In 1953 he became vice president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. In 1952 he gave the first Earle Raymond Hedrick Lectures of the MAA. He was editor of the American Journal of Mathematics.

Radó made ​​important contributions to the calculus of variations, potential theory, partial differential equations, differential geometry, measure theory and topology. In 1925 he proved in the article " On the Concept of a Riemann surface " that every topological space can be triangulated, thus continuing the keystone for the classification of land which had been previously prepared for triangulated surfaces by Dehn and Heegaard.

He originated in computability theory, the idea of ​​industrious beaver ( Busy Beaver ) and the related, well-defined, but not predictable Radó function. Today it is independent of Jesse Douglas, the solution of the Plateau problem awarded ( 1930). He used it completely different methods ( approximation by conformal mappings ) as Douglas.

Radó was married since 1924 and had two children; it is on the Bellevue Memorial Park buried in Daytona Beach, Florida.

Writings

• On the Concept of a Riemann surface, Acta Universitatis Scientarum Mathematicarum Szegediensis, 1925.
• The problem of least area and the problem- of Plateau, Math Journal Vol 32, 1930, p 763
• On the Problem of Plateau, Springer- Verlag, Berlin, results of mathematics and its applications, 1933, 1951, 1971.
• Subharmonic Functions, Springer, results of mathematics and its applications, 1937.
• Length and Area, AMS Colloquium Lectures, 1948.
• Paul V. Reichelderfer Continuous transformations in analysis - with an introduction to algebraic topology, Springer, 1955.
• On Non- Computable Functions, Bell System Technical Journal 41/1962.
• Computer studies of Turing machine problems, Journal of the ACM 12/1965.