Alexander Abian

Alexander Smbat Abian (1923 to 1999) was an Iranian-born Armenian-American mathematician who taught for more than twenty-five years at Iowa State University. Born in Tabriz to an Armenian family, he took his first degree in Iran, emigrated to the United States in 1950, earned a master's degree at the University of Chicago and then a doctorate at the University of Cincinnati, where his dissertation on a topic in invariant theory was written under the direction of Isaac Barnett. After teaching posts in Tennessee, New York, Pennsylvania and Ohio he joined the Iowa State faculty in 1967 and retired in 1993. He wrote three books, on the theory of sets and transfinite arithmetic, on linear associative algebras and on Boolean rings, and published more than two hundred papers. He also became widely known outside mathematics for his frequent posts to Usenet newsgroups and for his 1991 claim that destroying the Moon would end seasonal weather disasters, a proposal astronomers rejected on several grounds.