Person: Kurepa, Dura

Duro Kurepa was a Croatian mathematician who worked in mathematical logic and the foundations of mathematics.

Kurepa attended elementary school in Majske Poljane, the small town in which he was born, then moved to the nearby town of Glina to continue his education.
Kurepa graduated in 1931 with a degree in pure mathematics and physics, then spent a year teaching as an assistant in mathematics at the University of Zagreb.
In Paris Kurepa was advised by Maurice Fréchet and he submitted his thesis Ensembles ordonnés et ramifiés Ⓣ(Ordered and branched sets) to the Sorbonne in 1935.
After the award of his doctorate Kurepa continued to undertake research, first at the University of Warsaw, then in 1937 back again in Paris.
It collapsed shortly after Germany surrendered in 1945 and Kurepa found himself in the newly formed Yugoslavia.
Kurepa continued his links with Belgrade through the 1950s, then in 1965 he was invited to fill a chair of mathematics at the University of Belgrade.
The topics which Kurepa investigated are very varied but lie mostly within topology, set theory and number theory.
Kurepa conjectured that the greatest common divisor of !n!n!n and n!n!n! was 2 for all n>1n > 1n>1.
There are many equivalent forms of the conjecture, but one of the most natural was given by Kurepa in the same 1971 paper, namely that !n!n!n is not divisible by nnn for any n>2n > 2n>2.
Kurepa played a major role in mathematics in Yugoslavia.

Born 16 August 1907, Majske Poljane near Glina, Austria-Hungarian Empire (now Croatia). Died 2 November 1993, Belgrade, Serbia.

View full biography at MacTutor

Origin Croatia

Thank you to the contributors under CC BY-SA 4.0!

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