AlexanderM. Ostrowski (1893-1986): His life, work, and ...
Document source : www.cs.purdue.edu
4
W. Gautschi
Rockefeller Research Fellow at Oxford, Cambridge, and Edinburgh. Shortly
after returning to Göttingen, he received -- and accepted -- a call to the
Ostrowski, in his 40s and 50s, and at 60
University of Basel. The local newspaper (on the occasion of Ostrowski's
80th birthday) could not help recalling that 200 years earlier, the university
lost Euler to St. Petersburg because, according to legend, he found himself
at the losing end of a lottery system then in use for choosing candidates
(in reality, he was probably considered too young for a professorship at
the university). Now, however, the university hit the jackpot by bringing
Ostrowski from Russia to Basel!
Ostrowski, Washington, D.C., 1964
Ostrowski remained in
Basel for his entire aca-
demic career, acquiring the
Basel citizenship in 1950. It
was here where the bulk of
his mathematical work un-
folded. Much of it lies in the
realm of pure mathematics,
but important impulses re-
ceived from repeated vis-
its to the United States in
the late forties and early
fifties stirred his interest in
more applied problems, par-
ticularly numerical methods
in conformal mapping and
problems, then emerging, relating to the iterative solution of large systems
of linear algebraic equations. He went about this work with great enthu-
Summary :
The local newspaper (on the occasion of Ostrowski's 80th birthday) could not help recalling that 200 years earlier, the university lost Euler to St. Petersburg because, according to legend, he found himself at the losing end of a lottery system then in use for choosing candidates (in reality, he was probably considered too young for a professorship at the university).
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