Rodion Kuzmin

Kuz’min, Rodion Osievich 

Born Nov. 10 (22), 1891, in the village of Riabye, now in Vitebsk Oblast; died Mar. 24, 1949, in Leningrad. Soviet mathematician. Corresponding member of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR (1946).

Kuz’min graduated from the University of Petrograd in 1916. He was appointed a professor at the Leningrad Polytechnic Institute in 1922. His principal works dealt with the theory of numbers and with mathematical analysis. He devoted a number of works to the study of the arithmetic properties of numbers. In 1930 he proved that numbers of the form ab, where a is an algebraic number and b is a quadratic real irrational number, are transcendental. Thus according to this theorem, the number 2^, for example, is transcendental. Kuz’min obtained important results in the theory of zeta functions connected with the problem of the distribution of primes. He was a prominent teacher and the author of a number of textbooks.

REFERENCE

Venkov, B. A., and I. P. Natanson. “R. O. Kuz’min (1891–1949)” (obituary). Uspekhi matematicheskikh nauk, 1949, vol. 4, issue 4. (Contains a bibliography.)