Dmitry Mirimanoff

Dmitry Semionovitch Mirimanoff was a Russian-born mathematician who worked in Switzerland, born in Pereslavl-Zalessky on 13 September 1861 and died in Geneva on 5 January 1945. He was a member of the Moscow Mathematical Society in 1897, took a doctorate in mathematical sciences at Geneva in 1900 after the family moved there in search of a better climate for his health, taught at the universities of Geneva and Lausanne, and became a Swiss citizen in 1926. He made notable contributions to axiomatic set theory and to number theory, including work on Fermat's Last Theorem on which he corresponded with Albert Einstein. In a paper of 1917 he introduced the notion of a well-founded set and the rank of a set, and he also explored what are now called non-well-founded sets. In 2008 Marc Renault argued that he, rather than Désiré André, should be credited with the reflection method for Bertrand's ballot problem.