◀ ▲ ▶History / 19th-century / Person: Besicovitch, Abram Samoilovitch

Person: Besicovitch, Abram Samoilovitch

Abram Besicovitch was a Russian mathematician who worked mainly in England on functions of a real variable, analytic functions and almost periodic functions.

Mathematical Profile (Excerpt):

• Samuel Besicovitch had been a jeweller but his jeweller's shop had hit hard times through theft and he gave up the business and became a cashier.
• This in itself presented problems since, as Valentina Vietalievna was of the Orthodox faith and Besicovitch was a Karaim, they were not allowed to marry.
• Besicovitch was accepted into the Russian Orthodox Church so that the marriage could take place.
• In 1917 the University of Perm became an independent institution and in that year Besicovitch was appointed professor of mathematics there.
• As the Red Army had approached, all the staff except Besicovitch had left the University.
• Perm suffered badly in the troubles of 1919 despite the best efforts of Besicovitch to protect the books and other university property.
• Besicovitch had to teach people without any educational background and he was very unhappy.
• Besicovitch left Petrograd for Copenhagen in 1924 and there worked with Harald Bohr.
• After he visited Oxford in 1925 Hardy, who quickly saw the mathematical genius in Besicovitch, found a post for him in Liverpool.
• At Cambridge Besicovitch lectured on analysis in most years but he also gave an advanced course on a topic which was directly connected with his research interests such as almost periodic functions, Hausdorff measure, or the geometry of plane sets.
• Besicovitch never seems to have been troubled in this way.
• Besicovitch, around 1930, extended his density properties of sets to those of finite Hausdorff measure.
• The figures that resulted from Besicovitch's construction were highly complicated, unbounded figures.
• Other areas on which Besicovitch worked included geometric measure theory, Hausdorff measure, real function theory, and complex function theory.
• In addition to this work on deep mathematical theories, Besicovitch loved problems, particularly those which could be stated in elementary terms but which proved resistant to attack.
• Besicovitch showed that this was false and that the man had a path which meant that the lion would never catch him, although he would come arbitrarily close.
• Besicovitch received many honours for his work.

Born 24 January 1891, Berdyansk, Russia. Died 2 November 1970, Cambridge, England.

View full biography at MacTutor

Tags relevant for this person:

Analysis, Geometry, Origin Russia

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@J-J-O'Connor

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References

Adapted from other CC BY-SA 4.0 Sources:

1. O’Connor, John J; Robertson, Edmund F: MacTutor History of Mathematics Archive