Boris Moiseyevich Schein (born June 22, 1938) is a Russian-American mathematician, an expert in semigroups, and a Distinguished Professor in the Department of Mathematical Sciences at the University of Arkansas.. Schein was born in Moscow on June 22, 1938, and moved to

Saratov Saratov (, ; rus, Сара́тов, a=Ru-Saratov.ogg, p=sɐˈratəf) is the largest city and administrative center of Saratov Oblast, Russia, and a major port on the Volga River upstream (north) of Volgograd. Saratov had a population of 901,36 ...

during World War II. He became interested in mathematics as a teenager, and came under the influence of Viktor Wagner, a professor of mathematics at Saratov State University. Schein did his undergraduate studies in Mechanics-Mathematics at Saratov State, and chose to specialize in geometry, Wagner's subject. In 1958 he solved the problem of characterizing the semigroups that could be embedded into an inverse semigroup. He graduated summa cum laude in 1960. He continued working as a graduate student with Wagner, and in 1962 defended a

candidacy Candidacy is a rite which takes place during Roman Catholic seminary formation, by which the Church recognizes the seminarian as worthy of being ordained (hence, they become a "candidate" for ordination to the priesthood). With the liturgical ref ...

dissertation on semigroups of transformations at the

Herzen State Pedagogical University of Russia Herzen University, or formally the Russian State Pedagogical University in the name of A. I. Herzen (russian: Российский государственный педагогический университет имени А. И. Герце� ...

in Saint Petersburg. He accepted a faculty position at Saratov in 1963, and defended his Doctor of Sciences thesis in 1966, again at Herzen State Pedagogical University. In 1968, Schein was one of the founding editors of the journal '' Semigroup Forum'', published by Springer-Verlag. However, in the 1970s his connections with Western mathematicians led to political difficulties, his correspondence with mathematicians outside the USSR was cut off, and his students were prevented from graduating. Eventually, in the late 1970s, his mentor Wagner retired from the university and Schein was dismissed. In 1979, Schein was able to travel to Austria with his wife and daughter, and immediately he obtained a temporary visiting position at Tulane University in New Orleans. In 1980, he took his present position at the University of Arkansas. Boris Schein is known for the Schein index, which is the least number of "concepts" necessary to express the logical matrix of a

binary relation In mathematics, a binary relation associates elements of one set, called the ''domain'', with elements of another set, called the ''codomain''. A binary relation over Set (mathematics), sets and is a new set of ordered pairs consisting of ele ...

as a Boolean sum, and where a concept is an

outer product In linear algebra, the outer product of two coordinate vector In linear algebra, a coordinate vector is a representation of a vector as an ordered list of numbers (a tuple) that describes the vector in terms of a particular ordered basis. An ea ...

of logical vectors. In 2011, Schein was named a distinguished reviewer of Zentralblatt MATH by the European Mathematical Society.Professor Named Distinguished Reviewer
, Univ. of Arkansas Dept. of Mathematical Sciences, retrieved 2012-02-03.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Schein, Boris Moiseyevich 1938 births Living people 20th-century American mathematicians 21st-century American mathematicians Soviet mathematicians University of Arkansas faculty Scientists from Saratov Tulane University faculty Soviet emigrants to the United States American people of Russian descent Herzen University alumni