Henry Andrew Pogorzelski (September 26, 1922 - December 30, 2015) was an
American
American(s) may refer to:
* American, something of, from, or related to the United States of America, commonly known as the "United States" or "America"
** Americans, citizens and nationals of the United States of America
** American ancestry, pe ...
mathematician of
Polish
Polish may refer to:
* Anything from or related to Poland, a country in Europe
* Polish language
* Poles, people from Poland or of Polish descent
* Polish chicken
*Polish brothers (Mark Polish and Michael Polish, born 1970), American twin screenwr ...
descent,
[.] a professor of mathematics at the
University of Maine. Much of Pogorzelski's research concerns the
Goldbach conjecture
Goldbach's conjecture is one of the oldest and best-known unsolved problems in number theory and all of mathematics. It states that every even natural number greater than 2 is the sum of two prime numbers.
The conjecture has been shown to hold ...
, the still-unsolved problem of whether every
even number
In mathematics, parity is the property of an integer of whether it is even or odd. An integer is even if it is a multiple of two, and odd if it is not.. For example, −4, 0, 82 are even because
\begin
-2 \cdot 2 &= -4 \\
0 \cdot 2 &= 0 \\
41 ...
can be represented as a sum of two
prime numbers.
[.]
Born in
Harrison, New Jersey, Pogorzelski served in the U.S. Army in
World War II.
He served as editor of ''
Mathematical Reviews
''Mathematical Reviews'' is a journal published by the American Mathematical Society (AMS) that contains brief synopses, and in some cases evaluations, of many articles in mathematics, statistics, and theoretical computer science.
The AMS also pu ...
'' from 1957 to 1964 and studied at the
Institute for Advanced Study under
André Weil
André Weil (; ; 6 May 1906 – 6 August 1998) was a French mathematician, known for his foundational work in number theory and algebraic geometry. He was a founding member and the ''de facto'' early leader of the mathematical Bourbaki group. Th ...
.
He received his Ph.D. from
CUNY
, mottoeng = The education of free people is the hope of Mankind
, budget = $3.6 billion
, established =
, type = Public university system
, chancellor = Fél ...
in 1969 under the advisor
Raymond Smullyan; his dissertation was on "Goldbach Sentences in Some Abstract Arithmetics Constructed from a Generalization of Ordinary Recursive Arithmetic". In 1974, after he had joined the Maine faculty, he was the only American invited by the
Polish Academy of Science
The Polish Academy of Sciences ( pl, Polska Akademia Nauk, PAN) is a Polish state-sponsored institution of higher learning. Headquartered in Warsaw, it is responsible for spearheading the development of science across the country by a society of ...
to visit Poland for the celebration of the 500th anniversary of the birth of
Copernicus.
In 2002, the University of Maine attempted to suspend Pogorzelski from teaching duties, but backed down after he filed an
age discrimination complaint.
As well as holding a faculty position at the University of Maine, Pogorzelski was the director of the Research Institute for Mathematics (formerly known as the Research Institute for Semiological Mathematics), an independent research institute located near the University of Maine in
Orono, Maine and modeled after the Institute for Advanced Study.
[.][Maine Higher Education – Presidents of Degree-Granting Institutions](_blank)
Maine Department of Education, retrieved 2010-02-04.[Research Institute for Mathematics](_blank)
web site, accessed 2010-02-04. He proposed in 1993 to offer doctorates through the institute; the proposal was rejected at the time,
[.] but the Research Institute for Mathematics is now the only institution in Maine that grants doctoral degrees in mathematics.
Henry Pogorzelski died December 30, 2015, in Orono, Maine.
References
External links
Pogorzelski's web siteat the University of Maine.
In memoriam pageat the University of Maine.
{{DEFAULTSORT:Pogorzelski, H. A.
1922 births
2015 deaths
20th-century American mathematicians
21st-century American mathematicians
University of Maine faculty
American people of Polish descent
Graduate Center, CUNY alumni
People from Harrison, New Jersey
United States Army personnel of World War II