Name Bela Kerekjarto Role Mathematician | ||
 | ||
Died June 26, 1946, Gyongyos, Hungary | ||
Education Eotvos Lorand University | ||
Béla Kerékjártó (October 1, 1898, Budapest – June 26, 1946, Gyöngyös) was a Hungarian mathematician who wrote numerous articles on topology.
Contents
Kerékjártó earned his Ph.D. degree from the University of Budapest. He taught at the Faculty of Sciences of the University of Szeged from 1922. In 1921 he introduced his program with a speech "On topological fundamentals of analysis and geometry" where he advocated that "complex analysis should be built with instruments of topology without metric elements such as length and area."
In 1923, he published one of the first books on Topology, and it was reviewed by Solomon Lefschetz in 1925. Hermann Weyl wrote that this book completely changed his views of the subject.
In 1919 he published a theorem on periodic homeomorphisms of the disc and the sphere. A claim to priority to the result was made by L. E. J. Brouwer, and the subject was revisited by Samuel Eilenberg in 1934. A modern treatment of Kerekjarto's theorem has been presented by Constantin and Kolev.
In 1938 he returned to Budapest to teach in university there.
Kerékjártó proved that the sphere is the only compact surface that admits a 3-transitive topological group in 1941.