Jacob David Tamarkin (Russian: Я́ков Дави́дович Тама́ркин, romanized: Yakov Davidovich Tamarkin, Ukrainian: Яків Давидович Тамаркін, romanized: Yakiv Davydovych Tamarkin; 11 July 1888 – 18 November 1945) was a Russian-American mathematician, best known for his work in mathematical analysis.
Biography
Tamarkin was born in Chernigov, Russian Empire (now Chernihiv, Ukraine), to a wealthy Jewish family. His father, David Tamarkin, was a physician and his mother, Sophie Krassilschikov, was from a family of a landowner. He shares a common ancestor with the Van Leer family, sometimes spelled Von Löhr or Valar.[1] He moved to St. Petersburg as a child and grew up there. In high school, he befriended Alexander Friedmann, a future cosmologist, with whom he wrote his first mathematics paper in 1906, and remained friends and colleagues until Friedmann's sudden death in 1925.
Vladimir Smirnov was his other friend from the same gymnasium. Many years later, they coauthored a popular textbook titled "A course in higher mathematics".
In 1925 he became worried about Russia's stability and decided to immigrate to the United States. His favorite memory was the examination in analytic geometry he had to take with an American consul in Riga, when he tried to prove his identity.[2] In the U.S., he became a lecturer at Dartmouth College. In 1927, Tamarkin received a professorship at Brown University where he remained until his retirement in 1945, after suffering a heart attack. He died later that year in Bethesda, Maryland, a suburb of Washington, D.C.[3]
