Octav Onicescu

Octav Onicescu (Romanian pronunciation: [okˈtav oniˈt͡ʃesku]; August 20, 1892 – August 19, 1983) was a Romanian mathematician, member of the Romanian Academy, and founder of the Romanian school of probability theory and statistics.

He was born in Botoşani, the son of Vlad Onicescu, from Ștefănești, Botoșani, and Ana, from Oniceni, Neamţ County. He graduated from the Botoşani A. T. Laurian High School in 1911 with a perfect average grade of 10. That same year, he entered the University of Bucharest, from where he graduated with degrees in mathematics and philosophy in 1913. From 1914 to 1916 he was a mathematics teacher at the military gymnasium of Dealu Monastery, near Târgovişte. From 1916 to 1918 he fought in World War I.

In 1919, Onicescu went to study geometry at the University of Rome, under the guidance of Tullio Levi-Civita. He earned his Ph.D. in June, 1920 for a thesis titled Sopra gli spazi einsteiniani a gruppi continui di transformazione ("On Einstein manifolds and groups of continuous transformations"). The thesis, which dealt with problems in differential geometry related to Albert Einstein's theory of relativity, was defended in front of a jury of 11 mathematicians, including Levi-Civita, Vito Volterra, and Guido Castelnuovo.