Leon Mirsky

Leon Mirsky, whose full name was Leonid, lived from 19 December 1918 to 1 December 1983 and was a Russian-British mathematician who worked in number theory, linear algebra and combinatorics. Born in Russia, he was sent at the age of eight to live with relatives in Germany and then in Bradford, England, studied at King's College London and Bristol, and spent most of his career at the University of Sheffield, where he earned his doctorate in 1949 and received a personal chair in 1971. His early work concerned r-free numbers, and with Paul Erdos he bounded the number of distinct values of the divisor function. He wrote textbooks on linear algebra and transversal theory, and Mirsky's theorem, a dual of Dilworth's theorem on chains and antichains in partially ordered sets, is named after him.