Felix Frankl
Austrian physicist (1905–1961)
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Felix Issidorowitsch Frankl (12 March 1905, Vienna – 7 Aprile 1961, Nalchik Russian: Феликс Исидорович Франкль) was an Austrian mathematician, who went to live in the Soviet Union where he had an academic career as a university professor.[1]
He studied topology at the Faculty of Mathematics of the University of Vienna under Hans Hahn, gaining his doctorate in 1927.[2]
Frankl joined the Austrian Communist Party in 1928 and (with the assistance of Pavel Aleksandrov) emigrated to the Soviet Union in 1929.[3] Here he initially collaborated with Lev Pontryagin in topology (they a paper co-authored a paper published in 1930 in the Mathematische Annalen. His interests then shifted to certain particular differential equations which are important for high-speed aerodynamics. These differential equations were of mixed elliptic-hyperbolic type. They determined the transition in aerodynamics between transonic and supersonic speeds.
He attended the First International Topological Conference held in Moscow in 1935.[4] In 1957 he was awarded the Leonhard Euler Gold Medal of the Russian Academy of Sciences.[1]
In 1950 he was expelled from the communist party and exiled to Bishkek.[3] He died in 1961 in Nalchik.[3]