Solomon Marcus (Romanian pronunciation: [ˈsolomon ˈmarkus]; March 1, 1925 - March 17, 2016) was a Romanian mathematician, member of the Mathematical Section of the Romanian Academy (full member since 2001) and Emeritus Professor of the University of Bucharest's Faculty of Mathematics. His main research was in the fields of mathematical analysis, mathematical and computational linguistics and computer science, but he also published numerous papers on various cultural topics: poetics, linguistics, semiotics, philosophy and history of science and education.

Biography

He was born in Bacău, Romania, to Sima and Alter Marcus, a Jewish family of tailors. From an early age he had to live through dictatorships, war, infringements on free speech and free thinking as well as anti-Semitism. At the age of 16 or 17 he started tutoring younger pupils in order to help his family financially.

He graduated from Ferdinand I High School in 1944, and completed his studies at the University of Bucharest's Faculty of Science, Department of Mathematics, in 1949. He continued tutoring throughout college and later recounted in an interview that he had to endure hunger during those years and that till the age of 20 he only wore hand-me-downs from his older brothers.

He obtained his PhD in Mathematics in 1956, with a thesis on the Monotonic functions of two variables, written under the direction of Miron Nicolescu. He was appointed Lecturer in 1955, Associate Professor in 1964, and became a Professor in 1966 (Emeritus in 1991).

Marcus has contributed to the following areas: 1) Mathematical Analysis, Set Theory, Measure and Integration Theory, and Topology; 2) Theoretical Computer Science; 3) Linguistics; 4) Poetics and Theory of Literature; 5) Semiotics; 6) Cultural Anthropology; 7) History and Philosophy of Science; 8) Education.

Marcus published about 50 books in Romanian, English, French, German, Italian, Spanish, Russian, Greek, Hungarian, Czech, Serbo-Croatian, and about 400 research articles in specialized journals in almost all European countries, in the United States, Canada, South America, Japan, India, and New Zealand among others; he is cited by more than a thousand authors, including mathematicians, computer scientists, linguists, literary researchers, semioticians, anthropologists and philosophers.

He is recognised as one of the initiators of mathematical linguistics and of mathematical poetics, and has been a member of the editorial board of tens of international scientific journals covering all his domains of interest.

Marcus is featured in People and Ideas in Theoretical Computer Science. A collection of his papers in English followed by some interviews and a brief autobiography was published in 2007 as Words and Languages Everywhere.

The book "Meetings with Solomon Marcus" (Spandugino Publishing House, Bucharest, Romania, 2010, 1500 pages), edited by Lavinia Spandonide and Gheorghe Păun for Marcus’ 85th birthday, includes recollections by several hundred people from a large variety of scientific and cultural fields, and from 25 countries. It also contains a longer autobiography.

Death

He died of cardiac problems at the Institutul Clinic Fundeni in Bucharest.