Bogdan Suceavă

Bogdan Suceavă (born September 27, 1969 in Curtea de Argeș) is a Romanian-born U.S. mathematician, journalist 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.^[1]

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.^[2]

Following his doctorate in 2002, Suceavă was hired by California State University, Fullerton.^[2]

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.^[3]

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.^[4]

Literary

Suceavă began his writing career in 1990 with a volume of prose and essays published by Topaz, Teama de amurg ("Fear of twilight"). 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.^{[5] [6]}

In 2007, Suceavă received the Fiction Award of the Association of Bucharest Writers for his novel, Miruna, A Tale.^[5]

Two of his books (Coming from an Off-Key Time, and Miruna, A Tale) have been translated into English, and received positive reviews.

Bibliography

Literature

1. Teama de amurg, Editura Topaz, Bucharest (1990)
2. Sub semnul Orionului, Editura Artprint, Bucharest (1992) – novel
3. Legende și eresuri, Magic Art Design, Bucharest (1995) – poetry
4. Imperiul generalilor târzii și alte istorii, Editura Dacia (2002) – short stories
5. Venea din timpul diez, Editura Polirom, Bucharest (2004) – novel (Coming from an Off-Key Time, translated by Alistair Ian Blyth, Northwestern University Press, 2011)
6. Bătălii și mesagii, Editura LiterNet, Bucharest (2005) - poetry
7. Miruna, o poveste, Editura Curtea Veche, Bucharest (2007) – novel (Miruna, A Tale, translated by Alistair Ian Blyth, Twisted Spoon Press, Prague, 2014.)
8. Distanțe, demoni, aventuri, Editura Tritonic, Bucharest (2007) - essays
9. Vincent nemuritorul, Editura Curtea Veche, Bucharest (2008) – novel
10. Noaptea când cineva a murit pentru tine, Editura Polirom, Bucharest (2010) – novel
11. Memorii din biblioteca ideală, Editura Polirom, Bucharest (2013) – essays
12. Să auzi forma unei tobe, Millennium Books, Satu Mare (2013) - collected short stories
13. Scrisori de la Polul Est, Editura Agol, Bucharest (2015) - essays
14. Republica, Editura Polirom, Iași (2016) - novel

Mathematics

1. Suceavă, Bogdan (2001). "The Chen invariants of warped products of hyperbolic planes and their applications to immersibility problems" (PDF). Tsukuba Journal of Mathematics. 25 (2): 311–320. 
2. Suceavă, Bogdan (2002). New Riemannian and Kählerian Curvature Invariants and Strongly Minimal Submanifolds. Michigan State University. Department of Mathematics. 
3. Yiu, Paul; Suceavă, Bogdan (2006). "The Feuerbach point and Euler lines". Forum Geometricorum. 6: 191–197. 
4. Boskoff, Wladimir; Suceavă, Bogdan (2008). "A projective characterization of cyclicity". Beiträge zur Algebra und Geometrie. 49 (1): 195–203. 
5. Suceavă, Bogdan (2010). "Tzitzeica Curves and Surfaces". Mathematica Journal. 12. , with A.F. Agnew, A. Bobe, W.G. Boskoff.
6. Suceavă, Bogdan (2011). "Distances generated by Barbilian's metrization procedure by oscillation of sub logarithmic functions". Houston Journal of Mathematics. 37: 147–159. 
7. Suceavă, Bogdan (2013). "New Curvature Inequalities for Hypersurfaces in the Euclidean Ambient Space". Taiwanese Journal of Mathematics. 17 (3): 885–895. , with C.T.R. Conley, R. Etnyre, B. Gardener, L. H. Odom
8. Suceavă, Bogdan (2015). "A Medieval Mystery: Nicole Oresme’s Concept of Curvitas=Notices of the American Mathematical Society" (PDF). 62 (9): 1030–1034. , with Isabel M. Serrano

References