Theodore Samuel Motzkin

Theodore Samuel Motzkin (; 26 March 1908 – 15 December 1970) was an Israeli-American mathematician.

Biography Motzkin's father Leo Motzkin, a Ukrainian Jew, went to Berlin at the age of thirteen to study mathematics. He pursued university studies in the topic and was accepted as a graduate student by Leopold Kronecker, but left the field to work for the Zionist movement before finishing a dissertation.

Motzkin grew up in Berlin and started studying mathematics at an early age as well, entering university when he was only 15. for a thesis on the subject of linear programming ).

In 1935, Motzkin was appointed to the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, contributing to the development of mathematical terminology in Hebrew. During World War II, he worked as a cryptographer for the British government. He was the first to prove the existence of principal ideal domains that are not Euclidean domains, being his first example.

He found the first explicit example of a nonnegative polynomial which is not a sum of squares, known as the Motzkin polynomial and showed that it was positive using the AM–GM inequality.

The quote "complete disorder is impossible," describing Ramsey theory, is attributed to him.