Grigore Moisil

Grigore Constantin Moisil (; 10 January 1906 – 21 May 1973) was a Romanian mathematician, computer pioneer, and titular member of the Romanian Academy. His research was mainly in the fields of mathematical logic (Łukasiewicz–Moisil algebra), algebraic logic, MV-algebra, and differential equations. He is viewed as the father of computer science in Romania. Moisil was also a member of the Academy of Sciences of Bologna and of the International Institute of Philosophy. In 1996, the IEEE Computer Society awarded him posthumously the Computer Pioneer Award. Biography Grigore Moisil was born in 1906 in Tulcea into an intellectual family. His great-grandfather, Grigore Moisil (1814–1891), a clergyman, was one of the founders of the first Romanian high school in Năsăud. His father, Constantin Moisil (1876–1958), was a history professor, archaeologist and numismatist; as a member of the Romanian Academy, he filled the position of Director of the Numismatics Office of the Academy. His mother, Elena (1863–1949), was a teacher in Tulcea, later the director of "Maidanul Dulapului" school in Bucharest (now "Ienăchiță Văcărescu" school). Grigore Moisil attended primary school in Bucharest, then high school in Vaslui and Bucharest (at ) between 1916 and 1922. In 1924 he was admitted to the Civil Engineering School of the Polytechnic University of Bucharest, and also the Mathematics School of the University of Bucharest. He showed a stronger interest in mathematics, so he quit the Polytechnic University in 1929, despite already having passed all the third-year exams. In 1929 he defended his Ph.D. thesis, La mécanique analytique des systemes continus (Analytical mechanics of continuous systems), before a commission led by Gheorghe Țițeica, with Dimitrie Pompeiu and Anton Davidoglu as members. The thesis was published the same year by the Gauthier-Villars publishing house in Paris, and received favourable comments from Vito Volterra, Tullio Levi-Civita, and Paul Lévy.