Pavel Urysohn

Pavel Samuilovich Urysohn (in Russian: ; 3 February 1898 – 17 August 1924) was a Soviet mathematician who is best known for his contributions to the theory of topological dimension, and for developing Urysohn's metrization theorem and Urysohn's lemma, both of which are fundamental results in topology. He also constructed what is now called the Urysohn universal space and his name is also commemorated in the terms Fréchet–Urysohn space, Menger–Urysohn dimension and Urysohn integral equation. He and Pavel Alexandrov formulated the modern definition of compactness in 1923.

Biography Pavel Urysohn was born in Odesa in 1898. His mother died when he was little, and he entered the care of his father and sister. The family moved to Moscow in 1912, where Urysohn completed his secondary education. While still at school, he worked at Shanyavsky University on an experimental project on X-ray radiation and was supervised by Petr Lazarev.

At that time, Urysohn's interests lay predominantly in physics. Urysohn enrolled at the Moscow State University in 1915 and earned his Bachelor of Science in 1919. He then became an assistant professor at Moscow University, and Egorov prompted him to start working in topology.

Urysohn and Aleksandrov were staying in a cottage in Brittany, France, when Urysohn drowned at the age of 26 while swimming off the coast nearby Batz-sur-Mer.