Blagovest Hristov Sendov ( bg, Благовест Сендов; 8 February 1932 – 19 January 2020) was a

Bulgaria Bulgaria (; bg, България, Bǎlgariya), officially the Republic of Bulgaria,, ) is a country in Southeast Europe. It is situated on the eastern flank of the Balkans, and is bordered by Romania to the north, Serbia and North Macedo ...

mathematician A mathematician is someone who uses an extensive knowledge of mathematics in their work, typically to solve mathematical problems. Mathematicians are concerned with numbers, data, quantity, structure, space, models, and change. History On ...

, diplomat and

politician A politician is a person active in party politics, or a person holding or seeking an elected office in government. Politicians propose, support, reject and create laws that govern the land and by an extension of its people. Broadly speaking ...

Early life and education

Sendov was born in

Asenovgrad Asenovgrad ( bg, Асеновград ) is a town in central southern Bulgaria, part of Plovdiv Province. It is the largest town in Bulgaria that is not a province center. Previously known as ''Stanimaka'' (; el, Στενήμαχος), it was ...

Career

Academic

Sendov was the

rector Rector (Latin for the member of a vessel's crew who steers) may refer to: Style or title *Rector (ecclesiastical), a cleric who functions as an administrative leader in some Christian denominations *Rector (academia), a senior official in an edu ...

Sofia University Sofia University, "St. Kliment Ohridski" at the University of Sofia, ( bg, Софийски университет „Св. Климент Охридски“, ''Sofijski universitet „Sv. Kliment Ohridski“'') is the oldest higher education i ...

, located in

Sofia Sofia ( ; bg, София, Sofiya, ) is the capital and largest city of Bulgaria. It is situated in the Sofia Valley at the foot of the Vitosha mountain in the western parts of the country. The city is built west of the Iskar river, and h ...

, Bulgaria; and the Chairman of Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, also located in Sofia. He had more than 200 publications in fields related to mathematics and computer science.

Post-1989 political career

Sendov took part as an

independent Independent or Independents may refer to: Arts, entertainment, and media Artist groups * Independents (artist group), a group of modernist painters based in the New Hope, Pennsylvania, area of the United States during the early 1930s * Independ ...

in the 1992 Bulgarian presidential election with Ognyan Saparev as his running mate, finishing in 4th place with 2.24% of the votes.

National Assembly of Bulgaria

From 1995 to 1997, he was the

Chairperson of the National Assembly of Bulgaria The Chairman of the National Assembly of the Republic of Bulgaria (Председател на Народното събрание на Република България, transliterated as ''Predsedatel na Narodnoto sabranie na Republika Balgar ...

; and from 1997 to 2002, he was its Deputy Chairperson. His candidacy for that position was supported by the Bulgarian Socialist Party (BSP), the successor to the

Bulgarian Communist Party The Bulgarian Communist Party (BCP; bg, Българска Комунистическа Партия (БКП), Balgarska komunisticheska partiya (BKP)) was the founding and ruling party of the People's Republic of Bulgaria from 1946 until 198 ...

(BCP). Although never a member of the BCP, Sendov had close ties to former Bulgarian communist

dictator A dictator is a political leader who possesses absolute power. A dictatorship is a state ruled by one dictator or by a small clique. The word originated as the title of a Roman dictator elected by the Roman Senate to rule the republic in tim ...

Todor Zhivkov Todor Hristov Zhivkov ( bg, Тодор Христов Живков ; 7 September 1911 – 5 August 1998) was a Bulgarian communist statesman who served as the ''de facto'' leader of the People's Republic of Bulgaria (PRB) from 1954 until 1989 ...

. The rightist Union of the Democratic Forces removed him temporarily from that duty in 2000 when Sendov cosigned, together with four members of the BSP, a letter to the Israeli president asking that portraits of the Bulgarian Royal Family (from the 1940s) be removed from a memorial in Israel. This memorial commemorates that all

Bulgarian Jews The history of the Jews in Bulgaria goes back almost 2,000 years. Jews have had a continuous presence in historic Bulgarian lands since before the 2nd century CE, and have often played an important part in the history of Bulgaria. Today, ...

were saved from deportation to

concentration camps Internment is the imprisonment of people, commonly in large groups, without charges or intent to file charges. The term is especially used for the confinement "of enemy citizens in wartime or of terrorism suspects". Thus, while it can simply ...

during

World War II World War II or the Second World War, often abbreviated as WWII or WW2, was a world war that lasted from 1939 to 1945. It involved the vast majority of the world's countries—including all of the great powers—forming two opposing ...

Bulgaria ambassador to Japan

Sendov was Bulgarian ambassador to Japan from 2004 to 2009.

Sendov's conjecture

Sendov's name is attached to one of the major unsolved problems in the study of

polynomial In mathematics, a polynomial is an expression consisting of indeterminates (also called variables) and coefficients, that involves only the operations of addition, subtraction, multiplication, and positive-integer powers of variables. An example ...

zeros,

Sendov's conjecture In mathematics, Sendov's conjecture, sometimes also called Ilieff's conjecture, concerns the relationship between the locations of roots and critical points of a polynomial function of a complex variable. It is named after Blagovest Sendov. The ...

(sometimes incorrectly known as Ilieff's conjecture).

Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts

In 2000 he was elected as a member of

Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts The Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts ( la, Academia Scientiarum et Artium Serbica, sr-Cyr, Српска академија наука и уметности, САНУ, Srpska akademija nauka i umetnosti, SANU) is a national academy and the ...

, an academic institution located in Belgrade,

Serbia Serbia (, ; Serbian: , , ), officially the Republic of Serbia (Serbian: , , ), is a landlocked country in Southeastern and Central Europe, situated at the crossroads of the Pannonian Basin and the Balkans. It shares land borders with Hungar ...

References

;Books :

External links

Staff writer In journalism, a staff writer byline indicates that the author of the article is an employee of the periodical, as opposed to being an independent freelance writer. In Britain, staff writers may work in the office instead of traveling to cover a b ...

(12 December 2007).
"''Curriculum Vitae'' of Blagovest Sendov"
(Sendov's personal page as a mathematician). Institute for Parallel Processing's module at the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences. Accessed 21 January 2011. * {{DEFAULTSORT:Sendov, Blagovest 1932 births Chairpersons of the National Assembly of Bulgaria 20th-century Bulgarian mathematicians 21st-century Bulgarian mathematicians Ambassadors of Bulgaria to Japan 2020 deaths Members of the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences Members of the National Assembly (Bulgaria) Members of the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts People from Asenovgrad Sofia University faculty Rectors of Sofia University