Abram Samoilovitch Besicovitch


Abram Samoilovitch Besicovitch was a Russian mathematician, who worked mainly in England. He was born in Berdyansk on the Sea of Azov to a Karaite Jewish family.

Life and career

Abram Besicovitch studied under the supervision of Andrey Markov at the St. Petersburg University, graduating with a PhD in 1912. He then began research in probability theory. He converted to Eastern Orthodoxy, joining the Russian Orthodox Church, on marrying in 1916. He was appointed professor at the University of Perm in 1917, and was caught up in the Russian Civil War over the next two years. In 1920 he took a position at the Petrograd University.
In 1924 he went to Copenhagen and Harald Bohr, on a Rockefeller Fellowship, where he worked on almost periodic functions, which now bear his name. After a visit to G.H. Hardy at the University of Oxford, he had appointments at the University of Liverpool in 1926, and the University of Cambridge in 1927.
Besicovitch moved to Cambridge University in 1927, and by 1950 he had been appointed to the Rouse Ball Chair of Mathematics, which he held until his retirement in 1958, he then toured the US for eight years before returning to Trinity College Cambridge until his death in 1970. He was appointed Lecturer in the Faculty of Mathematics, and therefore received recognition as a Cambridge MA by 'Special Grace' on 24 November 1928. He worked mainly on combinatorial methods and questions in real analysis, such as the Kakeya needle problem and the Hausdorff-Besicovitch dimension. These two particular areas have proved increasingly important as the years have gone by.
He was also a major influence on the economist Piero Sraffa, after 1940, when they were both Fellows of Trinity College, Cambridge, and on Dennis Lindley, one of the founders of the Bayesian movement in the United Kingdom. He was J.E. Littlewood's successor in 1950 in the Rouse Ball chair at the University of Cambridge, retiring in 1958. He died in Cambridge.

Awards and honours

Besicovitch was in 1934 made FRS and in 1952 won the Sylvester Medal from the Royal Society. He received in 1950 the De Morgan Medal of the London Mathematical Society. He was a visiting scholar at the Institute for Advanced Study in the fall of 1954.
Besicovitch's candidacy for the Royal Society reads:
The asteroid 16953 Besicovitch is named in his honour.
A portrait of Besicovitch by Eve Goldsmith Coxeter is in the collection of Trinity College, Cambridge.

Quotation