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Commemoration on Ottó Varga on the centenary of his birth
| Content Provider | Semantic Scholar |
|---|---|
| Author | Tamássy, Lajos |
| Copyright Year | 2010 |
| Abstract | Ottó Varga was an outstanding researcher, an architect of Finsler geometry in the 40-th and 50-th years of the last century, and initiator of the study of this geometry in Hungary. The greatest number of citations relate to his works both in the first and second monographs on Finsler geometry, written by Hanno Rund in 1959, and a generation later, in 1986, by Makoto Matsumoto. He was born in 1909 in Szepetnek, a small village in western Hungary as a son of a Lutheran priest. Soon the family moved to Poprad (now in Slovakia). Varga attended his secondary school in the nearby town Kezmarok, a picturesque place of old historic tradition at the foot of the Tatra mountains. Here he became perfect in the Czech and German languages. He started his university studies at the Architecture Faculty of Vienna Polytechnic, but after a year he changed for the German University in Prague. Here he became influenced by the work of Ludwig Berwald, and started studies in Finsler geometry at its early stage. He received his Ph.D. degree in 1934 under Berwald's, supervision and he acquired his Habilitation in 1937 at the German University at a young age. In the meantime he spent a year in Hamburg at Wilhelm Blaschke. At the same time was a postdoctoral fellow there the well known Chinese-American geometer Shiing-Shen Chern, who passed away a few years ago in a high age. They never could meet each other later. After the German occupation of Czechoslovakia Varga left Prague, and after a short stay in Kolozsvár (Cluj), he moved to Debrecen. At that time he was the single mathematician at Debrecen University. This was not an exceptional phenomenon. Between the two world wars a chair usually meant a single professor and not more. Only the chairs with laboratories, as the chairs for physics or chemistry were exceptions, where one could find a first (senior) assistant. After the war the number of the students increased considerable, a new university structure was set up, and at the end of the 1950s years, when out of family reason Varga left Debrecen for Budapest, he left behind |
| File Format | PDF HTM / HTML |
| Alternate Webpage(s) | http://www.emis.de/journals/AMAPN/vol26_2/amapn26_12.pdf |
| Language | English |
| Access Restriction | Open |
| Content Type | Text |
| Resource Type | Article |
