Gyula Vályi

Gyula Vályi (1855 to 1913) was a Hungarian mathematician and theoretical physicist who spent his career at the University of Kolozsvár, now Cluj in Romania. Born in Marosvásárhely, the town of Farkas and János Bolyai, he studied at Kolozsvár and then for two years in Berlin, where Kummer, Borchardt, Weierstrass and Kronecker were lecturing. His doctoral dissertation concerned partial differential equations of the second order. He became professor of theoretical physics at Kolozsvár in 1884 and professor of mathematics the following year, lecturing on analysis, geometry and number theory, and his courses included Weierstrassian function theory and János Bolyai's Appendix. His own problems included which triangles are similar to their nth pedal triangle and which integer sided triangles have an area equal to their perimeter. As his eyesight failed he lectured from memory, and he retired in 1911 when he felt that his memory too was beginning to fail.