Cornelius Vagy Lánczos

Birth: Löwy Kornél, 2 Feb 1893, Székesfehérvár - Hungary Jewish Vital Records - Birth Certificate. A note was added on 20 Feb 1906 that he had assumed the surname Lánczos in place of Löwy. (Media) https://www.familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:D5HL-WLMM

Marriage: Lanczos Kornél & Maria Elisabeth Rump, 12 Nov 1927, Frankfurt-am-Main (Media)

Marriage: Lanczos Kornél and Maria-Erzsebet Rump, 5 Jan 1930, Székesfehérvár, Hungary. https://familysearch.org/ark:/61903/3:1:33S7-9TMV-S6W?mode=g&i=20&c...

Arrival: Canada-USA Manifest - Elmar Lanczos (acc. Cornelius Lanczos), 3 Sep 1939 (Media) https://www.myheritage.com/research/record-10942-1173003/elmar-lanc...

Census: 1940 U.S. Census - Cornelius and Elmar T Lanczos - West Lafayette, Indiana https://www.familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:V1B4-SY4 (Cornelius listed as 'Widowed')

Burial: Farkasrét Jewish Cemetery, Budapest, 25 Jun 1974 https://www.familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:QVVN-RSTF
Find-a-Grave: https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/19089953/korn%C3%A9l-l%C3%A1nczos

Obituary: In Memory of Cornelius Lánczos, 1975. (Seven contributors). https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/81106756.pdf

Cornelius (Cornel) Lanczos (Hungarian: Lánczos Kornél, pronounced ˈlaːnt͡soʃ ˈkorneːl, (until 1906: Löwy Kornél) was a Hungarian mathematician and physicist, who was born on February 2, 1893, and died on June 25, 1974. He was born in Székesfehérvár to Karl Löwy (Lőwy Károly) and Adél Hahn.

Lanczos's Ph.D. thesis (1921) was on relativity theory. In 1924 he discovered an exact solution of the Einstein field equation, which represents a cylindrically symmetric rigidly rotating configuration of dust particles. This was later rediscovered by Willem Jacob van Stockum and is known today as the van Stockum dust. It is one of the simplest known exact solutions in general relativity, and is regarded as an important example, in part because it exhibits closed timelike curves. Lanczos served as assistant to Albert Einstein during the period of 1928–29.

He did pioneering work along with G.C. Danielson on what is now called the fast Fourier transform (FFT, 1940), but the significance of his discovery was not appreciated at the time, and today the FFT is credited to Cooley and Tukey (1965). (As a matter of fact, similar claims can be made for several other mathematicians, including Carl Friedrich Gauss.[1])

Working in Washington DC at the U.S. National Bureau of Standards after 1949, Lanczos developed a number of techniques for mathematical calculations using digital computers, including: the Lanczos algorithm for finding eigenvalues of large symmetric matrices; the Lanczos approximation for the gamma function; and the conjugate gradient method for solving systems of linear equations.

In 1962, Lanczos showed that the Weyl tensor, which plays a fundamental role in general relativity, can be obtained from a tensor potential which is now called the Lanczos potential.

Lanczos resampling is based on a windowed sinc function as a practical upsampling filter approximating the ideal sinc function. Lanczos resampling is widely used in video up-sampling for digital zoom applications.

Lanczos was an outstanding physics teacher. Books such as The Variational Principles of Mechanics (1949)[2] show his explanatory ability and enthusiasm for the subject.

During the McCarthy era, Lanczos came under suspicion for possible Communist links. In 1952, he chose to leave the U.S. and move to the School of Theoretical Physics at the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies in Ireland, where he succeeded Schrödinger[3] and stayed until 1968.[4] When at D.I.A.S. he wrote the classic book, Applied Analysis (1956).[5]

According to a short speech delivered Oct 1, 2010 during Lanczos' induction to the NIST Portrait Gallery of Distinguished Staff, his daughter-in-law, Alice Lanczos, described his return to Hungary in 1939 from his then-position at Purdue University, when he attempted to convince his family to return to the US with him due to the anti-Jewish Nazi threat. His wife was too ill to travel, and died several weeks later from tuberculosis. He was only able to extricate his 5 year old son and return to the US just before the war began. When the Nazis purged Hungary of Jews in 1944, only his sister and a nephew survived. That son married, moved to Seattle and raised two sons. When his son Elmar looked at his own firstborn son he said "For me, it proves that Hitler did not win."

Publications

Books
Lanczos, Cornelius; and William R. Davis (ed.) (1998). Collected published papers with commentaries. Raleigh, N.C.: North Carolina State University. ISBN 0-929493-01-X. # Lanczos, Cornelius (1961). Linear Differential Operators. Van Nostrand. ISBN 048665656X. # Lanczos, Cornelius (1966). Albert Einstein and the cosmic world order: six lectures delivered at the University of Michigan in the Spring of 1962. Interscience. # Lanczos, Cornelius (1966). Discourse on Fourier series. Oliver & Boyd. # Lanczos, Cornelius (1968). Numbers without end. Edinburgh: Oliver & Boyd (Contemporary science paperbacks). # Lanczos, Cornelius (1970). Judaism and science. Leeds University Press. ISBN 085316021X. (22 pages, S. Brodetsky Memorial Lecture) # Lanczos, Cornelius (1970). The Variational Principles of Mechanics. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. ISBN 0-8020-1743-6.4th edn. Dover Paperback. 1974. # Lanczos, Cornelius (1974). The Einstein Decade (1905–1915). Histories of Science Series. Paul Elek/ Granada Publishing Ltd. ISBN 0236176323. # Lanczos, Cornelius (1979). Space through the ages: The evolution of geometric ideas from Pythagoras to Hilbert and Einstein. Academic Press. ISBN 0124358500.

Articles
Lanczos, Cornelius (1962). The splitting of the Riemann tensor. Rev. Modern Phys. 34 (3): 379. Bibcode:1962RvMP...34..379L. doi:10.1103/RevModPhys.34.379. # Lanczos, Cornelius (1924). Über eine stationäre Kosmologie im Sinne der Einsteinischen Gravitationstheorie. ZeitschrARRAY. Phys. 21: 73. Bibcode:1924ZPhy...21...73L. doi:10.1007/BF01328251.

References
Michael T. Heideman, Don H. Johnson, and C. Sidney Burrus (October 1984). Gauss and the History of the Fast Fourier Transform. IEEE ASSP Magazine: 14. Lewis, D. C. (1951). Review: The variational principles of mechanics, by C. Lanczos. Bull. Amer. Math. Soc. 57 (1, Part 1): 88–91. doi:10.1090/s0002-9904-1951-09462-8. Louis Komzsik (2003). The Lanczos Method: Evolution and Application. SIAM. p. 79. DIAS Past Members: Lanczos, C. Todd, John (1958). Review: Applied analysis by C. Lanczos. Bull. Amer. Math. Soc. 64 (4): 210–211. doi:10.1090/s0002-9904-1958-10215-3.

Barbara Gellai (2010): The Intrinsic Nature of Things: the life and science of Cornelius Lanczos, American Mathematical Society ISBN 978-0-8218-5166-1 . Brendan Scaife (1974): Studies in Numerical Analysis: Papers in Honour of Cornelius Lanczos, Dublin; London ; New York: Academic Press. ISBN 0-12-621150-7.

External links
O'Connor, John J.; Robertson, Edmund F., Cornelius Lanczos, MacTutor History of Mathematics archive, University of St Andrews. Cornelius Lanczos at the Mathematics Genealogy Project. Cornelius Lanczos, Collected published papers with commentaries, published by North Carolina State University. Photo gallery of Lanczos by Nicholas Higham. Series of historic video tapes produced in 1972, digitalized on the occasion of the 120th anniversary of Cornelius Lanczos's birth.