Szolem Mandelbrojt

Who was Szolem Mandelbrojt?

Szolem Mandelbrojt was a Jewish-Polish mathematician. He worked mainly in classical analysis; he was a student of Jacques Hadamard, and became Hadamard's successor as Professor at the Collège de France.

He was an early member of the Bourbaki group, taking part in some of its initial gatherings. In fact his direction was very different, as his publications show, with an interest in Dirichlet series, lacunary series, entire functions and other major topics in complex analysis and harmonic analysis. He is more accurately described as a follower of G. H. Hardy, and can be placed in the group containing Norbert Wiener and Torsten Carleman who were moderate modernisers of classical Fourier analysis. Shmuel Agmon, Jean-Pierre Kahane, Yitzhak Katznelson, and Paul Malliavin are among his students.

During World War II he was in the United States, in Houston at the Rice Institute from 1940, being one of many French scientists helped by the programme of Louis Rapkine.

Benoît Mandelbrot was his nephew.