Ervand Kogbetliantz

Ervand George Kogbetliantz was a French and American mathematician of Armenian descent and the first president of the Yerevan State University. He left Russia in 1918. He received a Doctorate in mathematics from the University of Paris in 1923. His mathematical work was mainly on infinite series, on the theory of orthogonal polynomials, on an algorithm for singular value decomposition which bears his name, on algorithms for the evaluation of elementary functions in computers, and the enumeration of prime elements of the Gaussian integers. He also invented a three-dimensional version of chess. He was working at his death with Bobby Fischer on a game of chess for three people. When he first went to America (1941), he taught mathematics at Lehigh University. In the early 1950s, he was a consultant for IBM in New York City and taught at Columbia University. Prior to moving back to Paris and retiring, he was a professor at Rockefeller University.