Bogdan Suceavă


Bogdan Suceavă is a Romanian-American mathematician and writer.

Biography

Bogdan Suceavă was born in Curtea de Argeș, Romania, on September 27, 1969. Growing up, Suceavă spent his holidays with his maternal grandparents at Nucșoara, a remote community that maintained its traditions, unbroken by the collectivisation elsewhere of Ceaușescu regime. There he absorbed Balkan folk-tales and myths, which would inform some of his literary works. Suceavă mentioned his maternal grandmother was a cousin of Elisabeta Rizea, a figure of Romanian anti-communist resistance.
Suceavă attended the University of Bucharest, where he obtained his undergraduate and master's degree in mathematics. He then moved to the United States to study at the Michigan State University for his doctorate. His thesis, titled New Riemannian and Kählerian Curvature Invariants and Strongly Minimal Submanifolds, was written under the supervision of Bang-Yen Chen.
Following his doctorate in 2002, Suceavă was hired by California State University, Fullerton.

Career

Mathematics

At the age of 13, Suceavă won a prize at the Romanian National Mathematical Olympiad, following which he was encouraged to pursue mathematics as a viable career. During his undergraduate years he studied mathematical analysis with Solomon Marcus and Ion Colojoară, algebra with Constantin Vraciu and Constantin Niță, geometry with Adriana Turtoi, Stere Ianuș, and Liviu Nicolescu, among others. At Michigan State University he took courses with Selman Akbulut, Bang-Yen Chen, John D. McCarthy, Thomas Parker, and Baisheng Yan, and others.
Suceavă is a Professor of Mathematics at the California State University, Fullerton. He specialises in Differential geometry, the foundations of geometry, and the history of mathematics.
Suceavă is active in the encouragement of mathematical research among young students in California. He has established a mathematics circle involving undergraduates, and extensively published in gazettes of mathematical problems aimed at high school students.
His mathematical works appeared in Houston Journal of Mathematics, Taiwanese Journal of Mathematics, American Mathematical Monthly, Mathematical Intelligencer, Beiträge zur Algebra und Geometrie, Differential Geometry and Its Applications, Czechoslovak Mathematical Journal, Publicationes Mathematicae, Results in Mathematics, Tsukuba Journal of Mathematics, Notices of the American Mathematical Society, Contemporary Mathematics, Historia Mathematica, and other mathematical journals.
On October 21, 2017, Suceavă delivered one of the invited addresses at the Fall 2017 Meeting of the Southern California Nevada Mathematical Association of America. His conference was titled ″Curvature: From Nicole Oresme to Contemporary Interpretations.″
Suceavă served as editor, together with Alfonso Carriazo, Yun Myung Oh and Joeri Van Der Veken, of the volume Recent Advances in the Geometry of Submanifolds. Dedicated to the Memory of Franki Dillen, American Mathematical Society, 2016.
In July 2020, Suceavă is one of the co-authors of the paper Eclectic Illuminism: Applications of Affine Geometry. The College Mathematics Journal, 50, 82–92, written with A. Glesser, M. Rathbun, and I. M. Serrano, presented with 2020 MAA's George Pólya Award. The title of the paper is a reference to a phrase used by Dan Barbilian to describe Felix Klein's Erlangen Programm. In MAA's press release, it is stated that ″this paper presents deep intellectual thought and is very engaging for all readers.″

Literary

Suceavă began his writing career in 1990 with a volume of prose and essays published by Topaz, Teama de amurg. He has also published various volumes of novels and short stories.
While Suceavă writes predominantly in Romanian, his short fiction in English has appeared in Review of Contemporary Fiction, Absinthe: New European Writing, and Red Mountain Review.
In 1989, Suceavă was a student in Bucharest during the downfall of the Ceaușescu dictatorship. Its impact on his country's social and cultural life motivated him to write his novel Venea din timpul diez in 2004.
In 2007, Suceavă received the Fiction Award of the Association of Bucharest Writers for his novel, Miruna, A Tale.
Two of his books have been translated into English, and received positive reviews.
In 2015, the Czech version of the novel Coming from an Off-Key Time, in Jiří Našinec's translation, was presented with the Josef Jungmann Award.
Suceavă presented his books to Salon du Livre, Festival of the Book Budapest, Vilenica Festival, Turin International Bookfair, Prague Book Fair, New Literature from Europe Festival, FILIT - International Festival of Literature and Translation, Iași, and in many academic events focused mainly on Eastern European fiction in the US, in Romania, and other places.

Literature

  5. , with A.F. Agnew, A. Bobe, W.G. Boskoff.
  7. , with C.T.R. Conley, R. Etnyre, B. Gardener, L. H. Odom
  8. , with Isabel M. Serrano