From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

[edit] Spelling of Alaoğlu

Hello Grasyop. I noticed that you changed the spelling of the mathematician Alaoglu on a number of pages. This man was born in 1914, got his PhD at the University of Chicago in 1938 and worked at a number of American universities. All the papers of his that are easily traceable are in US mathematical journals, and in those papers I did not see him spell his name with the breve accent. I think that more evidence would be needed that he ever spelled his name with the breve accent. It would not be wise to revise people's spelling based solely on the historical origin of their names; there would be a lot of surprising results. EdJohnston 03:22, 23 October 2006 (UTC)

Thanks for your response. I'm not sure that he IS Turkish. Google and JSTOR do not find any biographical articles on him. Since Leonidas was a war hero of classical Greece, one suspects Leonidas Alaoglu is more likely to be Greek, though with a typically Turkish surname. This is not a contradiction (cf. Constantine Karamanlis, a president of Greece though with a Turkish surname), but of he was of Greek descent he would be unlikely to spell his surname with accented letters from the modern Turkish alphabet. (He was born in 1914, which is before the introduction of the romanized Turkish alphabet). EdJohnston 21:26, 23 October 2006 (UTC)

Thanks for the update. It is frustrating that no other info is available. Unless you object, I'll update the Banach-Alaoglu article to remove the comment that he is Turkish. Actually on JSTOR I DID find a picture but nothing else about him! Conceivably I could write to the person who submitted the picture, if he has an email address. EdJohnston 20:18, 24 October 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Have Alaoglu's CV via personal communication

Thanks to Tom Apostol, emeritus professor at Cal Tech, we have the CV of Leon Alaoglu! Now there is the problem that it's not published, so have WP:V to deal with. It turns out that he was born March 19, 1914 in Red Deer, Alberta. His name is pronounced Ah-lá-oh-glue. His parents were Greek but lived in Turkey before coming to Canada. It seems that he worked at Lockheed as an operations researcher for most of his career (1944-1981) and this may explain why his amazing math papers are from the 30s and early 40s only. Do you have any ideas for how to get this information in past WP:V? You can't say 'personal communication' in a WP article, can you? I had the strange idea that I could upload his CV as an image file into Commons; I wonder if that's ever been tried. EdJohnston 02:34, 27 October 2006 (UTC)

See Leonidas Alaoglu for the resulting article. Feel free to make any improvements. EdJohnston 21:38, 30 October 2006 (UTC)