- Veniamin Kagan
Veniamin Fedorovich Kagan ( _ru. Вениамин Фёдорович Каган) (
10 March 1869 –8 May 1953 ) was aRussia nmathematician and expert ingeometry . He is the maternal grandfather of mathematician Yakov Sinai.Biography
Kagan was born in
Shavli ,Imperial Russia (nowŠiauliai ,Lithuania ) in 1869, to a poorJew ish family. In 1871 his family moved toYekaterinoslav (nowDnipropetrovsk ), where he grew up. Kagan entered the Imperial Novorossiya University inOdessa in 1887, but was expelled for revolutionary activities in 1889. He was put onprobation and sent back to Yekaterinoslav. He studied mathematics on his own and in 1892 passed the state exam atKiev University .In 1894 Kagan moved to
St Petersburg where he continued his studies withAndrey Markov and Konstantin Posse. They tried to help him to obtain an academic position, but Kagan's Jewish background was an obstacle. Only in 1897 was he allowed to became a dozent at the Imperial Novorossiya University, where he continued to work until 1923. His students in thetheory of relativity class he taught in 1921-22 included Nikolaj Papaleksi, Alexander Frumkin andIgor Tamm . Kagan worked atMoscow State University where he held the Geometry Chair from 1923 till 1952. Aging and disillusioned withanti-Semitic practices, he resigned from the university and died inMoscow soon afterwards.Mathematical work
He published over 100 mathematical papers in different parts of
geometry , particularly onLobachevsky geometry and onRiemannian geometry . He received theUSSR State Prize in 1943. He founded the science publisher "Mathesis" in Odessa. He was a director of the mathematics and natural sciences department of theGreat Soviet Encyclopaedia . He wrote a definitive biography of Nikolai Lobachevsky and edited his collected works (5 volumes, 1946–1951).Kagan's doctoral students include
Pyotr Rashevsky ,Viktor Wagner andIsaak Yaglom .Trivia
* Mathematician Veniamin Fedorovich Kagan from Odessa is a minor character in "The Fourth Prose" (1930) by
Osip Mandelstam .External links
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* [http://stonesi.net/kstatie/article.php?sid=848 Biography] – in the "Kstati" newspaper (in Russian)
Wikimedia Foundation. 2010.
