His
is not a household name, but Ervand Kogbetliantz was an accomplished
mathematician and inventor who lived and taught in the United States
from the 1940s-1960s.
Ervand
George Kogbetliantz was born on February 21, 1888, in the old Armenian
community of Nor Nakhichevan (Novo Nakhichevan), in the Northern
Caucasus, now part of Rostov-on-the-Don (Russia). We do not know
anything about his early years, but it appears that love for mathematics
came to him naturally. He studied mathematics at the University of
Paris (1907) and graduated from the School of Mathematics at Moscow
University (1912), where he taught from 1912-1918. In 1918 he invented
one of the oldest forms of three-dimensional chess. He returned to the
Northern Caucasus, and taught at the Polytechnic Institute of
Ekaterinodar (nowadays Krasnodar) from 1918-1920.
It
appears that the newly-opened University of Yerevan, in the fledgling
Republic of Armenia, attracted him, and he taught there for a few
months. A couple of weeks after Armenia became a Soviet republic, on
December 17, 1920, Commissar of Education Ashot Hovhannisian issued a
decree about the restructuring of the university, and established an
advisory committee presided by Kogbetliantz, which was entrusted with
the task.
In
1921 Kogbetliantz left Armenia for France. He obtained a doctorate in
mathematics from the University of Paris in 1923. He taught at the
Russian High School of Paris in the 1920s and was president of the Union
of Geophysicists from 1927-1933.
Kogbetliantz
received an invitation from Reza Shah to organize the chairs of
mathematics and celestial mechanics at the University of Tehran in 1933,
which he also directed until 1938. His efforts were rewarded with the
Elmi Order, the highest of Iran.
In
1939 he returned to Paris as a researcher for the National Center of
Scientific Research and kept that position until 1942. As many other
scholars, he left occupied France and crossed the Atlantic. He taught
mathematics at Lehigh University (1942-1944) and then at the New School
of Social Research (1944-1954) and Columbia University (1946-1953).
Meanwhile, he was a consultant for Standard Oil (1945-1946) and then for
IBM (1953-1964). He became a member of the Rockefeller Institute in
1956.
His
mathematical work was mainly on integral equations, the theory of
orthogonal polynomials, numerical analysis, gravity and magnetic
theories, etcetera. He formulated an algorithm for singular value
decomposition which bears his name. He authored close to one hundred
scholarly articles and books, some of them in translation (
Fundamentals of Mathematics from an Advanced Viewpoint,
4 volumes, 1968;
Handbook of First Complex Prime Numbers,
1971,
with Alice Krikorian). He also invented precision devices to measure
Earth magnetism, and various analogical and gyroscopic devices.
Kogbetliantz was one of the co-creators of the IBM 7030, also known as
Stretch, the first transistorized supercomputer created by IBM, which
was on sale from 1961-1964.
In 1952 Kogbetliantz’s three-dimensional chess received much media attention, and was described in several articles in
Time, Newsweek, New Yorker,
and
Life,
including
pictures of his chess set. At his death, he was working with world
champion Bobby Fischer on a game of chess for three people.
He retired in 1964 and moved back to Paris, where he passed away on November 5, 1974.
