Octav Onicescu
Romanian mathematician (1892-1983)
Octav Onicescu (Romanian pronunciation: [okˈtav oniˈt͡ʃesku]; August 20, 1892 – August 19, 1983) was a Romanian mathematician and a member of the Romanian Academy. Together with his student, Gheorghe Mihoc, he is considered to be the founder of the Romanian school of probability theory and statistics.
Biography
He was born in Botoșani, the son of Vlad Onicescu, from Ștefănești, Botoșani County, and Ana, from Oniceni, Neamț County. He graduated from the Botoșani A. T. Laurian High School in 1911 with a perfect average grade of 10. That same year, he entered the University of Bucharest, from where he graduated with degrees in mathematics and philosophy in 1913. From 1914 to 1916 he was a mathematics teacher at the military gymnasium of Dealu Monastery, near Târgoviște. From 1916 to 1918 he fought in World War I.
In 1919, Onicescu went to study geometry at the University of Rome, under the guidance of Tullio Levi-Civita. He earned his PhD in June, 1920 for a thesis titled Sopra gli spazi einsteiniani a gruppi continui di transformazione ("On Einstein manifolds and groups of continuous transformations"). The thesis, which dealt with problems in differential geometry related to Albert Einstein's theory of relativity, was defended in front of a jury of 11 mathematicians, including Levi-Civita, Vito Volterra, and Guido Castelnuovo.
In the fall of 1920 he went to Paris, where he gave talks in Jacques Hadamard's seminar at the Collège de France.
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This entry incorporates text from “Octav Onicescu” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.