Dimitrie Pompeiu


Dimitrie D. Pompeiu was a renowned Romanian mathematician.

Biography

After studying in Dorohoi and Bucharest, he went to France, where he studied mathematics at the University of Paris. He obtained a Ph.D. degree in mathematics in 1905 with a thesis, On the continuity of complex variable functions, written under the direction of Henri Poincaré. After returning to Romania, he was named Professor of Mechanics at the University of Iaşi. In 1912, he assumed a chair at the University of Bucharest. In 1934, he was elected member of the Romanian Academy.
His contributions were mainly in the field of mathematical analysis, complex functions theory, and rational mechanics. In an article published in 1929, he posed a challenging conjecture in integral geometry, now widely known as the Pompeiu problem. Among his contributions to real analysis there is the construction, dated 1906, of non-constant, everywhere differentiable functions, with derivative vanishing on a dense set. Such derivatives are now called Pompeiu derivatives.

Selected works