George Pólya
Born: 13 Dec 1887 in Budapest, Hungary
Died: 7 Sept 1985 in Palo Alto, California, USA
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Pólya worked in probability, analysis, number theory, geometry, combinatorics and mathematical physics.
Pólya enrolled at the University of Budapest to study law but found it boring. He then studied languages and literature. In order to understand philosophy he studied mathematics. He was awarded a doctorate from Budapest in mathematics in 1912.
He spent 1913 in Göttingen where he met Hilbert, Weyl and others. In 1914 he went to Zürich to an appointment arranged by Hurwitz.
He spent 1924 in England working with Hardy and Littlewood and their joint work Inequalities was published in 1934.
While in Zürich his output of mathematics was very large and wide ranging. In 1918 he published papers on series, number theory, combinatorics and voting systems. The following year in addition to papers in these topics he published on astronomy, probability. While he was doing this wide range of work he was working on some of his deepest results in the study of integral functions.
The political situation in Europe forced Pólya to move to the USA where after working at Brown University for two years he took up an appointment at Stanford. Before going to the USA Pólya had a draft of a book How to solve it written in German. Pólya had to try four publishers before finding one to publish the English version in the USA. It sold over one million copies over the years. Pólya gave wise advice
If you can't solve a problem, then there is an easier problem you can't solve: find it.
In probability Pólya looked at the Fourier transform of a distribution and proved a celebrated theorem on random walks.
Geometric symmetry and the enumeration of symmetry classes of objects was a major area of interest over many years.
His main contribution to combinatorics is his enumeration theorem, published in 1937.
Pólya's interest in complex analysis, conformal mappings and potential theory led him to study boundary value problems for partial differential equations.
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