URL: http://www-gap.dcs.st-and.ac.uk/~history/Mathematicians/Renyi.html
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Alfréd got hold of a soldier's uniform, walked into the ghetto, and marched his parents out. ... It requires familiarity with the circumstances to appreciate the skill and courage needed to perform these feats.At the end of World War II, Rényi obtained a Ph.D. at Szeged under F Riesz for work on Cauchy-Fourier series. He was taught by Fejér at Budapest, then he went to Russia and worked with Linnik on the theory of numbers, in particular working on the Goldbach conjecture. He discovered methods described by Turán as
at present one of the strongest methods of analytical number theory.After returning to Hungary he worked on probability which was to be his main research topic throughout his life.
He published joint work with Erdös on random graphs and also considered random space filling curves. Known by the nickname of Buba, he is best remembered for proving that every even integer is the sum of a prime and an almost prime number (one with only two prime factors), he is also remembered as the author of the anecdote
a mathematician is a machine for converting coffee into theoremsTurán developed the anecdote by describing weak coffee as fit only for lemmas.
Rényi was the founder, and for 20 years the director, of the Mathematical Institute of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. He was a famous raconteur remembered for many performances of his dialogue, which he spoke with his daughter, on the nature of mathematics.
Article by: J J O'Connor and E F Robertson
| List of References (16 books/articles) | A Quotation
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| Mathematicians born in the same country | |
| Other Web sites | Rényi's
Parking Constants |
| JOC/EFR December 1996 | School of
Mathematics and Statistics University of St Andrews, Scotland |
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| The URL of this page
is: http://www-history.mcs.st-andrews.ac.uk/history/References/Renyi.html | ||