Gyula Pál

Who was Gyula Pál?

Gyula Pál was a noted Hungarian-Danish mathematician. He is known for his work on Jordan curves both in plane and space, and on the Kakeya problem. He proved that every locally connected planar continuum with at least two points is the orthogonal projection of a closed Jordan curve of the Euclidean 3-space.

He was born as Gyula Perl but hungaricized his surname to Pál in 1909. Fleeing the post-war chaos of Hungary after World War I he moved to Denmark in 1919, possibly by the invitation of Harald Bohr, where he spent the rest of his life and westernized his name to Julius Pal.