Episodes of interferences of War and Math in the Life and Work of Werner Fenchel

Tinne Hoff Kjeldsen

doi:10.18542/amazrecm.v16i35.8559

Abstract

No presente artigo, estudamos episódios da vida e obra do matemático alemão-dinamarquês Werner Fenchel na perspectiva da importância da Segunda Guerra Mundial. Por um lado, veremos como a sociedade matemática, em particular o matemático Harald Bohr, ajudou Fenchel a estabelecer uma vida acadêmica em Copenhague, na Dinamarca. Por outro lado, veremos como a organização da contribuição do cientista para o esforço de guerra nos EUA durante a guerra e o financiamento militar pós-guerra da pesquisa acadêmica no período pós-guerra interferiu em alguns dos trabalhos matemáticos de Fenchel, especialmente em sua contribuição para a teoria da dualidade na programação não linear. Como tal, o estudo apresentado neste artigo contribui para nossa compreensão de como a matemática e as condições de um determinado local e tempo interferem na história da matemática.

Highlights

As with all human activities, mathematicians‟ work with mathematics is conditioned by time and place
The study presented in this paper of episodes of Fenchel‟s academic life from a perspective of the Second World War, shows aspects of how the War and mathematics interacted both with respect to his life conditions and in some of his mathematical work
The mathematical community at large played a role in helping German mathematicians to set up life in countries outside of Germany where they could continue their mathematical work

Summary

Introduction

As with all human activities, mathematicians‟ work with mathematics is conditioned by time and place. The Fenchels borrowed ten Swedish crowns from the police officer to get to Lund where they first stayed at the mathematics department at Lund‟s University and later in an apartment with other Danish refugees Their son, Tom Fenchel who was born in 1940, was left behind in Denmark. From letters between Fenchel, Tucker and Kuhn and from Fenchel‟s lecture notes it is clear that Fenchel was introduced to the programming problem by Tucker while he was in Princeton and that he developed what became the first duality result for nonlinear programming in the course of the series of lectures he gave in Tucker‟s project – as he wrote in the “Acknowledgement” section of the lecture notes: The author wishes to express his gratitude to Professor A. He noticed that in several of the inequalities used in analysis “pairs of “conjugate” functions occur” (p. 73) and the purpose of his paper was to explain the general idea underneath this correspondence

He considered a convex function

Conclusion