Gabriel Sudan (born c. 1899) was a Romanian mathematician, known for the Sudan function (1927), an important example in the theory of computation, similar to the Ackermann function (1928). Gabriel Sudan received his Ph.D. from the University of Göttingen in 1925 for his thesis Über die geordneten Mengen, supervised by David Hilbert. He taught at the Polytechnic University of Bucharest from 1941 until his retirement, in 1966. Sudan constructed the function that bears his name with the same aim as Wilhelm Ackermann: to solve in the affirmative a problem raised by Hilbert. The Ackermann and Sudan functions are chronologically the first examples of recursive functions which are not primitive recursive.
References
- Gabriel Sudan, Sur le nombre transfini ωω, Bulletin Math. Soc. Roumaine des sciences 30, 11–30 (1927). JFM review
- Wilhelm Ackermann, Zum Hilbertschen Aufbau der reellen Zahlen, Mathematische Annalen 99, 118–133 (1928). JFM review
- Cristian Calude, Solomon Marcus, Ionel Tevy, The first example of a recursive function which is not primitive recursive, Historia Mathematica 6 (1979), no. 4, 380–384 doi:10.1016/0315-0860(79)90024-7
- Solomon Marcus, "Grigore C. Moisil: A life becoming a myth", International Journal of Computers, Communications & Control, vol. 1 (2006), no. 1, 73–79.
