ARMENIA HONORS MATHEMATICIAN DMITRY MIRIMANOFF
The Armenian
Monday, September 26, 2011
Yerevan – Armenia will pay tribute to Dmitry Mirimanoff (1861-1945),
Russia-born mathematician of Armenian descent who earned international
acclaim and debated fundamental theories with Albert Einstein, but
has been largely unknown to Armenians.
The special conference timed to the 150th anniversary of Mirimanoff’s
birth is being co-organized by the Yerevan State University, Armenia’s
Academy of Sciences and the Mathematics Society.
The conference will involve two of Mirimanoff’s descendants living
in Switzerland and a number of accomplished scientists from Armenia
and abroad, including Vahe Gurzadyan of Yerevan Physics Institute
and French mathematician Guy Terjanian.
“A couple of years ago Dr. Patrick Mirimanoff, who is Dmitry
Mirimanoff’s grandson, became interested in his roots and this is
how I discovered his grandfather,” Pavel Galoumian who initiated the
conference idea told The Armenian Reporter.
“My first impression was that he was an outstanding mathematician
completely unknown in Armenia,” said Galoumian, a physicist by training
who previously worked in the field in Armenia and Switzerland.
>From Tiflis to Geneva by way of Russia
Born September 13, 1861 in the Russian town of Pereslavl-Zalessky,
Dmitry Mirimanoff was a son of engineer Semyon Mirimanovich Mirimanov
and Maria Dmitriyevna Rudakova from a noble Russian family who were
land owners in the area.
Mirimanovs (Mirimanians) were one of the most prominent Tiflis
(Tbilisi) families, with two of its representatives serving as city
mayors in the mid-19th century. The family settled in Tiflis more
than a century earlier and is believed to have relocated from the
Armenian community in New Julfa, Iran.
Dmitry Mirimanoff left Russia in 1880 to pursue university studies in
Italy and France. In France, he first enrolled at the University of
Montpellier and then the University of Paris, where he was taught by
some of the greatest mathematicians of the time, including Jean-Claude
Bouquet, Emile Picard, Paul Emile Appell, Charles Hermite and Henri
Poincare. In 1897, Mirimanoff was elected member of the Moscow
Mathematical Society.
In 1887 in Geneva Dmitry Mirimanoff married Malvina Geneviève Valentine
Adriansen. They had two sons: Alexandre born in Oranienbaum (now
Lomonossov, Russia) in 1898, and Andre born in Geneva in 1902.
In 1900 Mirimanoff defended his doctoral theses and entered the faculty
of the University of Geneva, first as privat-docent and rising to full
professorship in 1931. That same year he was elected an honorary member
of the Swiss Mathematical Society. He was honored “docteur honoris
causa” at the University of Lausanne in 1937 and at the University
of Lyon in 1942. Dmitry Mirimanoff died on 5 January 1945 in Geneva.
Scientific heritage
Main scientific works of Mirimanoff were devoted to the number theory,
set theory and the theory of probability; he also contributed to
the relativistic theory of the electron in the media. He was the
author of sixty scientific publications many of them winning high
scientific acclaim.
His contributions and pioneering works are acknowledged in mathematical
terminology as “Mirimanoff’s paradox”, “Kummer–Mirimanoff Congruences”
and “Cauchy–Liouville–Mirimanoff Polynomials.”
In a 2001 book dedicated to Mirimanoff, Swiss mathematician Ernst
Specker noted that “A highly original development of set theory
began with Mirimanoff. Many of his results were unrecognized, then
later obtained by and credited to others. We owe him, in particular,
the definition of the ‘Cantorian limit’ of a set”.
In recent years Mirimanoff’s role has been recognized by the Stanford
Encyclopedia and in publications of Paul Taylor, Yvon Gauthier,
Marc Renault and Donald Knuth.
Exchange with Einstein
In 1909, Mirimanoff published an article in the Berlin-based journal
Annalen der Physik which drew the attention of Albert Einstein. The
article devoted to the relativistic theory of electron in the media
led to Einstein’s “Comments on the work of D. Mirimanoff…” submitted
to the same journal.
The scientific exchange between Einstein and Mirimanoff continued in
private with both scientists commenting on cutting edge theories of
the day.
Armenian impact
Throughout the twentieth century several mathematicians of Armenian
origin working abroad achieved remarkable results in number theory.
Among them are Emil Artin (1898-1962), one of the leading algebraists
of the century, Levon Khachatryan (1954-2002), who was recognized for
contributions to set theory, number theory and cryptography, and Guy
Terjanian famous for his contribution to the Fermat’s last theorem.
However, Dmitry Mirimanoff was probably the first modern mathematician
of Armenian origin who left a profound imprint in the fundamental
science. Today, Mirimanoff’s accomplishments are being finally
celebrated in the Armenian homeland.