Grigore Moisil

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Cover of Gigore Moisil biography by Viorica Moisil
Cover of Gigore Moisil biography by Viorica Moisil

Grigore C. Moisil (born 10 January 1906 in Tulcea, Romania - died 21 May 1973 in Ottawa, Canada) was a Romanian mathematician and member of the Romanian Academy. His research was mainly in the fields of mathematical logic (Łukasiewicz-Moisil algebra), algebra and differential equations. He also had an important contribution to the introduction of the first electronic computers in Romania.

Moisil was also a member of the Academy of Sciences in Bologna and of the International Institute of Philosophy.

In 1996 IEEE Computer Society awarded him posthumously the Computer Pioneer Award.

Contents

[edit] Life

Grigore Moisil was born in 1906 in Tulcea into an intellectual family. His grandfather, Grigore Moisil (1814-1891), a clergyman, was one of the founders of the first Romanian high school in Năsăud. His father, Constantin Moisil (1867-1958), was a history professor, archeologist and numismatist - as a member of the Romanian Academy he filled the position of Director of the Numismatics Office of the Academy. His mother, Elena (1863-1949), was a teacher in Tulcea, later the director of "Maidanul Dulapului" school in Bucharest (now "Enachiţă Văcărescu" school).

Grigore Moisil attended primary school in Bucharest, then highschool in Vaslui and Bucharest (at "Spiru Haret" Highschool) between 1916-1922. In 1924 he enters the Constructions Faculty of the Polytechnic University of Bucharest and also the Mathematics Faculty of the University of Bucharest. He shows a stronger interest in mathematics, so he quits the Polytechnic University in 1929, despite already passing all third year exams. Also in 1929 he defends his Ph.D. thesis Analytical Mechanics of Continuous Systems before a commission lead by Gheorghe Titeica with Dimitrie Pompeiu and Anton Davidoglu as members. The thesis is published the same year by the Gauthier-Villars publishing house in Paris and receives favourable comments from Vito Volterra, Tullio Levi-Civita and Paul Lévy.

In 1930 Moisil goes to Sorbonne in Paris for further study in mathematics, which is finalised the next year with the presentation of the paper On a class of systems of equations with partial derivatives from mathematical physics. In 1931 he returns to Romania where he is appointed a teaching position at the Mathematics Faculty of the University of Iaşi. He leaves again for a one year Rockefeller scholarship to study in Rome.

In 1932 he returns to Iaşi where he remains for the next 10 years, developing a close relation with professor Alexandru Myller. He teaches the first modern algebra course in Romania, named Logic and theory of proof, at the University of Iaşi. In the same period he starts writing a series of papers based on the works of Jan Łukasiewicz in multi-valued logic. His research in mathematical logic laid the foundation for significant work done afterwards in Romania, as well as Argentina, Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia and Hungary. During the time spent in Iaşi he completed research remarkable for the many new ideas and for his way of finding and using new connections between concepts from different areas of mathematics.

Moisil published papers on mechanics, analysis, geometry, algebra and mathematical logic. He developed a multi-dimensional extension of Pompeiu's areolar derivative and studied monogenic functions of one hypercomplex variable with applications to mechanics. Moisil also introduced some three-valued and many-valued algebras, which he called Łukasiewicz algebras (also named Łukasiewicz-Moisil algebras) and used them in logics and the study of automata theory. He created new methods to analyze finit automata and had many contributions to the field of automata theory in algebra.

Moisil insisted and had important contributions to the creation of the first Romanian computers. He played a fundamental role in the development of computer science in Romania and in raising the first generations of Romanian computer scientists. He was awarded posthumously, in 1996, the Computer Pioneer Award by the IEEE Computer Society.

[edit] Main works

  • Transistor Circuits (2 volumes, 1961-1962)
  • Algebraic Theory of Automatic Devices (1959)
  • Introduction to Algebra (1954)
  • Logique modale (1942)
  • La mécanique analytique des systemes continus (1929)

[edit] Books on Grigore Moisil

  • Viorica Moisil (2002), Once upon a time... Grigore Moisil (A fost odată... Grigore Moisil), Curtea Veche Publishing House, ISBN 973-8356-09-1

[edit] External links

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