Radó Ferenc (Francisc)

May 21, 1921, Timișoara - November 27, 1990, Cluj

Mathematician

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Ferenc (Francisc) Radó

The picture of the graduates of the Israelite High School Timișoara 1938-1939. Radó Francisc is fourth from the left, third row.

He was born in 1921 in a Jewish family in the city of Timișoara, his father, Arthur, an inspector at the Romanian Railways, his mother, Melita, born Stillmann. Radó attended the Israeli elementary school in the Josephine neighborhood, then he was a brilliant student at the Israelite High School in Timișoara.

In 1939 he was admitted to the Polytechnic Institute in Bucharest. Studies at the Polytechnic were overshadowed from the outset by the oppressive anti-Semitic atmosphere that had persisted there since the 1920s, with Jewish students often victims of acts of aggression by members of right-wing extremist organizations, popular with many students. In Timișoara, no Jewish student was able to study at the local Polytechnic in 1925-1944, due to the opposition of the student association. Following the „racial” laws of 1940, Radó was expelled from college and sent to labor camps. Despite the harsh conditions, he continued at any free time to secretly study mathematics problems. After the coup d'etat of August 23, 1944 and the abolition of anti-Jewish laws, Radó resumed his studies and graduated from the "Victor Babeș" University of Cluj. Back in Timișoara, he taught mathematics at the Israelite High School, where he had been a student. In 1948, after the newly installed communist regime closed all private and religious schools, including the Jewish high school, Radó taught at a state high school and then, for a year, at the Pedagogical Institute in his hometown.

In 1950 Radó became a teacher at Bolyai University in Cluj-Napoca, which in 1959 merged with Babeș University, under the name Babeș-Bolyai University, with teaching in Romanian and Hungarian. In 1969 Radó was appointed university professor in this institution, a position he held until his retirement in 1985. In parallel, Radó worked as a principal researcher at the Computer Institute of the Romanian Academy branch in Cluj-Napoca. His doctoral dissertation in 1958 was in the field of functional equations and nomographic relations.

During the period of limited liberalization of the communist regime in 1960-1970, he was a member of the editorial board of the Scientific Journal of Geometry in Basel and of the publication Aequationes Mathematicae at the University of Waterloo in Canada, where he was guest professor in 1969-1970.

Ferenc Radó became known especially through his research in the field of geometry, functional equations, isometries in metric spaces, convex ensembles, supraannular geometries, numerical and graphical analysis, as well as in mathematical programming and its economic applications. Later, Radó became interested in the algebraic basis of geometry. In 1963 he used the "branch and bound" process to solve the problem of disjunctive programming.

Rado published, among others, in the magazines "Gazeta matematică" and Matematikai lapok, also in the Hungarian cultural magazine from Transylvania, "Utunk", and in 1954 he participated in writing the memorial book dedicated to János Bolyai and the annual almanac of the Hungarian cultural magazine “Korunk”.

Selection of articles

  • Two theorems concerning the separation of variables in nomography 1955
  • On rhomboidal nomograms 1956
  • The best projective transformation of the scales of alignment nomograms 1957
  • Functional equations in connection with nomography 1958

Cărți

  • 1954,1958 Analitikus geometria (Analytical geometry)
  • 1956 – Lecții de nomografie (with L. Ball)
  • 1958 – Analitikus geometriai példatár ( with Pal Szilágyi) (Book with examples in analytical geometry)
  • 1957,1959 – Feladatgyűjtemény középiskolai matematikai körök számára (Collection of exercises for high school math circles, with Erna Kiss) . I-II
  • 1979 – Geometry (with Gh.Galbură) (cu Gh.Galbură)
  • 1981 – A geometria mai szemmel (Geometry today, with Béla Orbán)
  • 1983 – Matematikai kislexikon (Little math lexicon, editor)

In memoriam

  • A room at the Faculty of Mathematics of Babeș-Bólyai University is named after him
  • 1993. The "Ferenc Radó" Mathematical Culture Society was founded in Cluj-Napoca, which publishes the "MatLap" magazine, the successor of the "Matematikai Lapok" newspaper.
  • An annual mathematics competition for high school students has been set up, named in memory of Ferenc Radó

Sources