Grigore Moisil was born in 1906 in Tulcea into an
intellectual family. His great-grandfather, Grigore Moisil (1814–1891), a
clergyman, was one of the founders of the
first Romanian high school in
Năsăud. His father,
Constantin Moisil (1876–1958), was a history professor,
archaeologist and
numismatist; as a member of the
Romanian Academy, he filled the position of Director of the Numismatics Office of the Academy. His mother, Elena (1863–1949), was a teacher in Tulcea, later the director of "Maidanul Dulapului" school in
Bucharest (now "
Ienăchiță Văcărescu" school). Grigore Moisil attended
primary school in Bucharest, then high school in
Vaslui and Bucharest (at ) between 1916 and 1922. In 1924 he was admitted to the Civil Engineering School of the
Polytechnic University of Bucharest, and also the Mathematics School of the
University of Bucharest. He showed a stronger interest in mathematics, so he quit the Polytechnic University in 1929, despite already having passed all the third-year exams. In 1929 he defended his
Ph.D. thesis,
La mécanique analytique des systemes continus (Analytical mechanics of continuous systems), before a commission led by
Gheorghe Țițeica, with
Dimitrie Pompeiu and
Anton Davidoglu as members. The thesis was published the same year by the Gauthier-Villars publishing house in
Paris, and received favourable comments from
Vito Volterra,
Tullio Levi-Civita, and
Paul Lévy. In 1930 Moisil went to the
University of Paris for further study in mathematics, which he finalized the next year with the paper
On a class of systems of equations with partial derivatives from mathematical physics. In 1931 he returned to Romania, where he was appointed in a teaching position at the Mathematics School of the
University of Iași. Shortly after, he left for a one-year
Rockefeller Foundation scholarship to study in
Rome. In 1932 he returned to
Iași, where he remained for almost 10 years, developing a close relationship with professor
Alexandru Myller. He taught the first
modern algebra course in Romania, named
Logic and theory of proof, at the University of Iași. During that time, he started writing a series of papers based on the works of
Jan Łukasiewicz in
multi-valued logic. His research in mathematical logic laid the foundation for significant work done afterwards in Romania, as well as
Argentina,
Yugoslavia,
Czechoslovakia, and
Hungary. While in Iași, he completed research remarkable for the many new ideas and for his way of finding and using new connections between concepts from different areas of mathematics. He was promoted to Full Professor in November 1939. In 1941, a position of professor at the
University of Bucharest opened up, and Moisil applied for it. However,
Gheorghe Vrânceanu,
Dan Barbilian, and
Miron Nicolescu also applied for the position, and Vrânceanu got it. Moisil approached the Ministry of Education, arguing that it would be a great opportunity for mathematics in Romania if all four could be appointed. As a result of his appeal, all four mathematicians were hired. Moisil moved to
Bucharest, where he became a Professor in the School of Mathematics (later the School of Mathematics and Computer Science) at the University of Bucharest, on 30 December 1941. From 1946 to 1948, Moisil took a leave of absence, being named
plenipotentiary envoy to
Ankara. While in
Turkey, he gave several series of mathematics lectures at
Istanbul University and
Istanbul Technical University. In 1948, he resumed teaching at the University of Bucharest. That same year, he was elected to the Romanian Academy, and a member of the
Institute of Mathematics of the Romanian Academy. After 1965, one of his students, George Georgescu, worked closely with him on multi-valued logics, and after the
Romanian Revolution of 1989, became a Professor of Mathematics and Logic at the same university and department as Moisil in 1991. His student also published extensive, original work on
algebraic logic,
MV-algebra,
algebra,
algebraic topology, categories of
MV-algebras,
category theory and
Łukasiewicz–Moisil algebra. ==Work==