Mitrofan Cioban (5 January 1942 – 2 February 2021) was a

Moldova Moldova, officially the Republic of Moldova, is a Landlocked country, landlocked country in Eastern Europe, with an area of and population of 2.42 million. Moldova is bordered by Romania to the west and Ukraine to the north, east, and south. ...

mathematician A mathematician is someone who uses an extensive knowledge of mathematics in their work, typically to solve mathematical problems. Mathematicians are concerned with numbers, data, quantity, mathematical structure, structure, space, Mathematica ...

specializing in

topology Topology (from the Greek language, Greek words , and ) is the branch of mathematics concerned with the properties of a Mathematical object, geometric object that are preserved under Continuous function, continuous Deformation theory, deformat ...

, a member of the

Academy of Sciences of Moldova The Academy of Sciences of Moldova (), established in 1961, is the main scientific organization of Moldova and coordinates research in all areas of science and technology. Ion Tighineanu has been the head of the Academy of Sciences since April 9 ...

Early life and education

Cioban was born in Copceac (then in Tighina County,

Romania Romania is a country located at the crossroads of Central Europe, Central, Eastern Europe, Eastern and Southeast Europe. It borders Ukraine to the north and east, Hungary to the west, Serbia to the southwest, Bulgaria to the south, Moldova to ...

, now in

Ștefan Vodă District Ștefan Vodă () is a district () in the south-east of Moldova, with the administrative center at Ștefan Vodă. As of 1 January 2011, its population was 71,900. The district is situated 100 km from Chișinău and 100 km from Odesa, Ukr ...

), the fourth child out of seven of

farmer A farmer is a person engaged in agriculture, raising living organisms for food or raw materials. The term usually applies to people who do some combination of raising field crops, orchards, vineyards, poultry, or other livestock. A farmer ...

s Mihail and Tecla Cioban. At age 17 he enrolled in the Faculty of Mathematics and Physics of Tiraspol State University. After one year Cioban transferred to

Moscow State University Moscow State University (MSU), officially M. V. Lomonosov Moscow State University,. is a public university, public research university in Moscow, Russia. The university includes 15 research institutes, 43 faculties, more than 300 departments, a ...

, where he started attending the Topology seminar of

Pavel Alexandrov Pavel Sergeyevich Alexandrov (), sometimes romanized ''Paul Alexandroff'' (7 May 1896 – 16 November 1982), was a Soviet mathematician. He wrote roughly three hundred papers, making important contributions to set theory and topology. In topol ...

. He obtained his

PhD A Doctor of Philosophy (PhD, DPhil; or ) is a terminal degree that usually denotes the highest level of academic achievement in a given discipline and is awarded following a course of graduate study and original research. The name of the deg ...

in 1969 with thesis ''Properties of Quotient Mappings and Classification of Spaces'' written under the direction of

Alexander Arhangelskii Alexander Vladimirovich Arhangelskii (, ''Aleksandr Vladimirovich Arkhangelsky'', born 13 March 1938 in Moscow) is a Russian mathematician. His research, comprising over 200 published papers, covers various subfields of general topology. He has d ...

. Despite initially not knowing

Russian Russian(s) may refer to: *Russians (), an ethnic group of the East Slavic peoples, primarily living in Russia and neighboring countries *A citizen of Russia *Russian language, the most widely spoken of the Slavic languages *''The Russians'', a b ...

German German(s) may refer to: * Germany, the country of the Germans and German things **Germania (Roman era) * Germans, citizens of Germany, people of German ancestry, or native speakers of the German language ** For citizenship in Germany, see also Ge ...

, or

English English usually refers to: * English language * English people English may also refer to: Culture, language and peoples * ''English'', an adjective for something of, from, or related to England * ''English'', an Amish ter ...

, he became well-versed in mathematical literature in these languages.

Academic and professional career

Upon graduation, Cioban returned in 1970 to Tiraspol State University as a faculty member, where he directed 17

theses and served as prorector and then rector. He published over 200 papers in academic journals from 1966 to 2020, mostly under the names of Choban or Čoban, and occasionally Cioban, Ciobanu, or Coban. Starting from 1999, he served as president of the Mathematical Society of the Republic of Moldova, with headquarters in

Chișinău Chișinău ( , , ; formerly known as Kishinev) is the Capital city, capital and List of cities and towns in Moldova, largest city of Moldova. The city is Moldova's main industrial and commercial centre, and is located in the middle of the coun ...

. Cioban supervised 22

students and 4 doctors for their

habilitation Habilitation is the highest university degree, or the procedure by which it is achieved, in Germany, France, Italy, Poland and some other European and non-English-speaking countries. The candidate fulfills a university's set criteria of excelle ...

in mathematics.

Scientific contributions

Cioban helped found the Moldovan school of

general topology In mathematics, general topology (or point set topology) is the branch of topology that deals with the basic set-theoretic definitions and constructions used in topology. It is the foundation of most other branches of topology, including differ ...

and made substantial contributions to the areas of

and

topological algebra In mathematics, a topological algebra A is an algebra and at the same time a topological space, where the algebraic and the topological structures are coherent in a specified sense. Definition A topological algebra A over a topological field K is a ...

descriptive set theory In mathematical logic, descriptive set theory (DST) is the study of certain classes of "well-behaved" set (mathematics), subsets of the real line and other Polish spaces. As well as being one of the primary areas of research in set theory, it has a ...

functional analysis Functional analysis is a branch of mathematical analysis, the core of which is formed by the study of vector spaces endowed with some kind of limit-related structure (for example, Inner product space#Definition, inner product, Norm (mathematics ...

optimization theory Mathematical optimization (alternatively spelled ''optimisation'') or mathematical programming is the selection of a best element, with regard to some criteria, from some set of available alternatives. It is generally divided into two subfiel ...

, and

measure theory In mathematics, the concept of a measure is a generalization and formalization of geometrical measures (length, area, volume) and other common notions, such as magnitude (mathematics), magnitude, mass, and probability of events. These seemingl ...

. He published his first major result in 1966 in ''

Proceedings of the USSR Academy of Sciences The ''Proceedings of the USSR Academy of Sciences'' (, ''Doklady Akademii Nauk SSSR'' (''DAN SSSR''), ) was a Soviet journal that was dedicated to publishing original, academic research papers in physics, mathematics, chemistry, geology, and biol ...

'', in which he generalized a theorem of

Arthur Harold Stone Arthur Harold Stone (30 September 1916 – 6 August 2000) was a British mathematician, born in London, who worked at the universities of Manchester and Rochester, mostly in topology. His wife was American mathematician Dorothy Maharam. Sto ...

on the metrizability of quotient spaces.

Death

Cioban died from

COVID-19 Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) is a contagious disease caused by the coronavirus SARS-CoV-2. In January 2020, the disease spread worldwide, resulting in the COVID-19 pandemic. The symptoms of COVID‑19 can vary but often include fever ...

on 2 February 2021 in

during the

COVID-19 pandemic in Moldova The COVID-19 pandemic in Moldova was a part of the worldwide pandemic of coronavirus disease 2019 () caused by severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (). The virus was confirmed to have reached the Republic of Moldova on 7 March ...

Publications

* *

References

External links

* {{DEFAULTSORT:Cioban, Mitrofan 1942 births 2021 deaths 20th-century Moldovan mathematicians 21st-century Moldovan mathematicians People from Ștefan Vodă District Moscow State University alumni Academic staff of Shevchenko Transnistria State University Algebraists Topologists Titular members of the Academy of Sciences of Moldova Recipients of the Order of Honour (Moldova) Deaths from the COVID-19 pandemic in Moldova