Background

Tibor Radó was born on June 2, 1895, in Budapest, Hungary, the son of Alexander Rado and Gizella Knappe.

Education

Rado began his university studies in civil engineering at the Technical University in Budapest. He received a doctorate from the Franz Joseph University in 1923.

Career

In 1915 Rado enlisted in the Royal Hungarian Army, was trained, and then commissioned a second lieutenant in the infantry. He took part in two major battles on the Russian front before being captured on a scouting mission. Of his capture, Rado recounted; “I had spent six months traveling back and forth through the Russian lines, picking up information, cutting telephone wires and holding up supply trains. Then one day I was surrounded by Russians - I wasn’t surprised.”

His four years in prison camps read like a dramatic scenario. As an officer, he found the camp in Tobolsk, Siberia, relatively comfortable in the period preceding the Revolution. Food was plentiful and cheap, but reading material was not readily available. The only books he could obtain happened to be on mathematics.

After the Revolution, the prisoners’ life changed drastically. They were packed into boxcars and transported thousands of miles under harrowing conditions, in order to get them out of the fighting zone. During the confusion, he and three fellow officers traded names with four private soldiers. As far as his family knew, Rado was dead. He spent the next year working as a laborer in railroad yards. He and a group of prisoners escaped by hijacking a train. Finally, in 1920 he returned to Budapest on an American financed boat which was assisting in the return of war prisoners. Back at the University of Szeged, he re-enrolled, this time as a mathematics major, and in 1922 he received his Ph.D. under Frigyes Riesz.

From 1922 to 1929 Rado was Privatdozent at the University of Szeged and also an adjunct at the Mathematical Institute in Budapest. He was awarded an international research fellowship of the Rockefeller Foundation to study at Munich during 1928-1929. In 1929 Rado went to the United States as a visiting lecturer, first at Harvard (fall semester, 1929-1930) and then at Rice Institute (spring semester, 1930). In 1930 he moved to Ohio State University as a full professor of mathematics.

In 1944-1945 Rado was a fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies at Princeton. At the end of World War II, he went to Europe as a scientific consultant with the Army Air Force to recruit German scientists needed by the United States. He returned to Ohio State as chairman of the mathematics department in 1946. He resigned this post in 1948 when he was appointed the first Ohio State University research professor, a position created to enable distinguished faculty members to pursue creative activity.

Rado’s research interests and contributions span a wide range of topics: conformal mapping, real variables, calculus of variations, partial differential equations, measure and integration theory, point-set and algebraic topology, rigid surfaces, logic, recursive functions, and what he called “Turing programs.”

Rado's first major original contribution concerned Plateau’s problem, finding the surface of minimal area bounded by a given closed contour in space. The problem, which originated in the initial phases of the calculus of variations, is named for Joseph Plateau, who conducted experiments on certain shapes with soap bubbles. The existence and uniqueness of solutions in the general case remained to be solved independently by Rado and Jesse Douglas in the early 1930s.

Rado’s interest in problems relating to surface measure dated from his work under Riesz’s guidance on problems raised by Zoard de Geocze. It was on the basis of the theory of functions of real variables of Lebesgue and Riesz that Rado was able to simplify and generalize Geocze’s results and help to create a modern theory of surface area measure.

He was also an editor of the American Journal of Mathematics and served as vice-president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 1953.

Achievements

• Radó's major achievement that he is known for is his solution of Plateau's problem: to find a surface of least area bounding a given simple closed unknotted curve in 3-dimensional Euclidean space. In 1930 Radó, and independently Jesse Douglas, were the first to give necessary and sufficient conditions for the existence of a solution.
  
  Radó made many other important contributions in conformal mappings, real analysis, calculus of variations, subharmonic functions, potential theory, partial differential equations, integration theory, differential geometry, and topology. For instance, he established necessary and sufficient conditions for the triangularity of topological surfaces, a result which completed more than half a century's work on the classification of compact surfaces by many major mathematicians.
  
  

Works

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  • Length and area 1948
  • SUBHARMONIC FUNCTIONS 1949
  • Continuous Transformations in Analysis: With an Introduction to Algebraic Topology 1955
  • On The Problem Of Plateau 1933
  • Magnetism: A Treatise on Modern Theory and Materials, Vol. 2B: Interactions and Metals 1965
  • ON DENSITY THEOREMS FOR OUTER MEASURES 1960

Membership

Rado was active in mathematical societies. He was a member and was invited to give the American Mathematical Society Colloquium Lectures in 1945, and in 1952 he gave the first Mathematical Association of America Hedrick Memorial Lecture. He was also a member and served as vice-president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (1953).

Connections

Tibor Radó was married to Ida Barbara de Albis on October 30, 1924, and had two children, Judith Viola (Mrs. William Santasiere) and Theodore Alexander.

Father:

Alexander Rado

Mother:

Gizella Knappe

Brother:

Richard Rado

1906-1989

Wife:

Ida Barbara de Albis

Daughter:

Judith Viola

Son:

Theodore Alexander Rado

teacher:

Frigyes Riesz

References

• Dictionary of Scientific Biography Volume 11
  1975