Szolem Mandelbrojt was born on 10 January 1899 in
Warsaw, Poland into a Jewish family of
Lithuanian descent. He was initially educated in Warsaw, then in 1919 he moved to
Kharkiv,
Ukraine (then
USSR) and spent a year as a student of the
Russian mathematician
Sergei Bernstein. A year later, he emigrated to France and settled in
Paris. In subsequent years, he attended the seminars of
Jacques Hadamard,
Henri Lebesgue,
Émile Picard, and others. In 1923, he received a doctorate from the
University of Paris on the
analytic continuation of the
Taylor series. Hadamard was his Ph.D. advisor. In 1924 Mandelbrojt was awarded a Rockefeller Fellowship in the
United States. In May 1926 he married Gladys Manuelle Grunwald (born 28 June 1904 in Paris). From 1926 to 1927, he spent a year as an assistant professor at the
Rice Institute (now Rice University) in
Houston, Texas. In 1928 he returned to France - having received French citizenship in 1927 – and was appointed an assistant professor at the
University of Lille. The following year he became a full professor at the
University of Clermont-Ferrand. In December 1934 Mandelbrojt co-founded the
Nicolas Bourbaki group of mathematicians, of which he was a member until
World War II. He succeeded Hadamard at Collège de France in 1938 and took up the Chair of
Analytical Mechanics and
Celestial Mechanics. Mandelbrojt helped several members of his family emigrate from Poland to France in 1936. One of them, his nephew
Benoit Mandelbrot, was to discover the
Mandelbrot set and coin the word
fractal in the 1970s. In 1939 he fought for France when the country was invaded by the Nazis, then in 1940, along with many scientists helped by
Louis Rapkine and the
Rockefeller Foundation, Mandelbrojt relocated to the United States, taking up a position at the Rice Institute. In 1944 he joined the scientific committee of the
Free French Forces in
London, England. In 1945 Mandelbrojt moved back to France and resumed his professional activities at Collège de France, where he remained until his retirement in 1972. In his retirement year he was elected a member of the
French Academy of Sciences. Szolem Mandelbrojt died at the age of 84 in Paris, France, on 23 September 1983. == Research ==