Béla Kerékjártó

Béla Kerékjártó (1898 to 1946) was a Hungarian mathematician who worked in topology and the foundations of geometry. Born in Budapest, he took his doctorate there in 1920 and, after periods in Berlin, Göttingen and Lausanne, habilitated at the University of Szeged. His 1923 book Vorlesungen über Topologie, written from lectures given at Göttingen, was the first book of its kind and drew praise from Lefschetz and Weyl, though Freudenthal later judged it harshly. He held the chair of geometry at Szeged from 1925, spent 1923 to 1924 at Princeton on a Rockefeller scholarship, and moved to the University of Budapest in 1938. His research linked Poincaré's last geometric theorem with Brouwer's translation theorem, classified open surfaces, and described continuous groups of the plane and of three-dimensional Euclidean and hyperbolic space. He was elected to the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, received its Zsigmond Kornfeld Prize in 1940, and died of tuberculosis at 47.