A Panorama of Hungarian Mathematics in the Twentieth Century, I

A glorious period of Hungarian mathematics started in 1900 when Lipót Fejér discovered the summability of Fourier series.This was followed by the discoveries of his disciples in Fourier analysis and in the theory of analytic functions. At the same time Frederic (Frigyes) Riesz created functional analysis and Alfred Haar gave the first example of wavelets. Later the topics investigated by Hungarian mathematicians broadened considerably, and included topology, operator theory, differential equations, probability, etc. The present volume, the first of two, presents some of the most remarkable results achieved in the twentieth century by Hungarians in analysis, geometry and stochastics.

The book is accessible to anyone with a minimum knowledge of mathematics. It is supplemented with an essay on the history of Hungary in the twentieth century and biographies of those mathematicians who are no longer active. A list of all persons referred to in the chapters concludes the volume.

• Analysis
• Fourier series
• Geometry
• History of Mathematics
• Hungarian Mathematics
• Minimum
• Stochastics
• calculus
• differential equation
• extrema
• functional analysis
• operator theory
• orthogonal polynomials
• statistics

From the reviews:

"This highly interesting book is more than a report on a glorious period of Hungarian mathematics. It is a survey of twentieth century mathematics describing the development of the fields covered in the book in a broad context. … Readers will surely appreciate brief biographies of 145 Hungarian mathematicians. The book is a valuable contribution to the history of 20th century mathematics. I can recommend it not only to historians of mathematics but to working mathematicians as well." (EMS Newsletter, March, 2007)

• Department of Mathematics, University of Maryland, College Park, USA

  János Horváth

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