Person: Steinfeld, Ottó

Ottó Steinfeld was a Hungarian mathematician who worked in Rings and Semigroup theory.

Steinfeld was able to continued his schooling.
Steinfeld was called up for military service in 1944 but as a Jew he was considered an "unreliable person" and forced to work as a manual labourer in deplorable conditions.
After the war ended Steinfeld was able to attend university.
It is interesting that most of Steinfeld's research went in the other direction for he often took ideal theoretic properties of rings and looked for analogues in semigroup theory, semiring theory, or the theory of partially ordered algebraic structures.
In 1955 Steinfeld was awarded his Candidate's degree, and the following year he left Szeged to take up an appointment in the Mathematical Institute of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences in Budapest.
In this last mentioned paper Steinfeld introduced the concept of a quasi-ideal.
Much of Steinfeld's contributions to quasi-ideals is contained in his monograph Quasi-ideals in rings and semigroups (1978).
Steinfeld was also much interested in primness, including prime ideals and prime elements in partially ordered semigroups.

Born 5 March 1924, Szarvas, Hungary. Died 8 July 1990, Budapest, Hungary.

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Origin Hungary

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