Michael Fekete

Michael Fekete, born Mihály Fekete (1886 to 1957), was a Hungarian-Israeli mathematician. He was born in Zenta in Austria-Hungary, today Senta in Serbia, and received his doctorate from the University of Budapest in 1909, having studied under Lipót Fejér. He then worked at the University of Göttingen and returned to Budapest in 1914 as a Privatdozent. Most of his scientific work concerned the transfinite diameter, and in 1922 he published a paper on extremal polynomials with his student János Neumann, which was Neumann's first scientific paper. In 1928 he emigrated to Mandate Palestine and became one of the first instructors of the Institute of Mathematics at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, a professor in 1929 and later head of the institute and Provost of the university. His students included Aryeh Dvoretzky and Michael Bahir Maschler, and in 1955 he received the Israel Prize for exact sciences.