Background
He was born in Berdyansk on the Sea of Azov (now in Ukraine) to a Karaite family.
mathematician rector university professor
He was born in Berdyansk on the Sea of Azov (now in Ukraine) to a Karaite family.
Abram Besicovitch studied under the supervision of Andrey Markov at the Saint St. Petersburg University, graduating with a Doctor of Philosophy in 1912.
He then began research in probability theory. He was appointed professor at the University of Permanent 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. After moving to Cambridge 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 United States of America for eight years before returning to Trinity College Cambridge until probably his death in 1970.
He was appointed Lecturer in the Faculty of Mathematics, and therefore received recognition as a Cambridge Master of Arts 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.
" A mathematician´s reputation rests on the number of bad proofs he has given.
Royal Society.