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Abstract

Alfred Rosenblatt (1880–1947) was a Polish mathematician born into a Jewish family in Krakow (Kraków, Poland). He studied in Vienna, Krakow, Göttingen, and worked at the Jagiellonian University in Krakow (1910–1936) and at the University of San Marcos in Lima, Peru (1936–1947). During the Second World War, Rosenblatt accepted Peruvian citizenship. His work was important for the development of mathematics in Peru, including the foundation of the National Academy of Exact Sciences, Physics and Natural Sciences in Lima. He is mentioned among the four mathematicians of the twentieth century most important for Peru (F. Villarreal, G. García Diaz, A. Rosenblatt and J. Tola Pasquel). He spent the first half of 1947 on a scholarship at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton and had several lectures at other universities in the USA.

Rosenblatt published almost three hundred scientific papers in various fields of pure and applied mathematics, including ordinary and partial differential equations, algebraic geometry, theory of analytic functions, probability, mathematical physics, three-body problem, hydro\-dynamics and other applications of mathematics. About 180 papers were published in the years of his work in Poland and about 120 in the years he worked in Peru. His publications are in Polish, German, French, Italian, Spanish and English. Rosenblatt participated actively in four International Congresses of Mathematicians: Cambridge (1912), Strasbourg (1920), Bologna (1928), Zurich (1932). He presented three talks in Bologna and one in Zurich.

We describe Alfred Rosenblatt’s life and important parts of his work in detail. We have made an effort to see all his papers, so as not to miss any of his achievements in mathematics and applications, including papers and information written in Spanish; e.g., [Ro11], [Ro13]–[Ro16] and [Ro20]. We have already written three articles, two in Polish [Ro8], [Ro9] and one in Russian [Ro12], to introduce him to Polish and Russian mathematicians. Now we want to do the same for a wider range of scientists with this article in English. Some information on Rosenblatt can also be found in [Ro1]–[Ro6], [Ro10] and [Ro17]–[Ro19].