Abraham Ziv

Ziv Abraham
Born	March 6, 1940 Israel
Died	March 5, 2013 (aged 72) Israel
Nationality	Israeli
Fields	Mathematics
Alma mater	Technion – Israel Institute of Technology and Harvard University
Thesis	A contribution to the zero sum theorem (1961)

Abraham Ziv (March 6, 1940–March 5, 2013 (aged 72)) was an Israeli mathematician, known for his contributions to Zero-sum problem as part of the discoverers of the Erdős–Ginzburg–Ziv theorem.

Life

He was born in Avihayil, Israel in the 1940s to Haim and Zila Zubkovski. Like many other Israeli-Jews of his time, he changed his surname in the '50s to Ziv, as part of the popular Hebraization of surnames movement. Abraham studied at the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology, where he earned his Ph.D, in mathematics, after receiving his master's degree from Harvard University a few years earlier. In 1961, at the age of 21, he proved along with Paul Erdős and Abraham Ginzburg the general result that every sequence of $2n - 1\$ elements of $\mathbb{Z}/n\mathbb{Z}$ contains $n$ terms that sum to zero.^[1]

In 1972 Ziv was part of the founding team of IBM R&D Labs in Israel, where he stayed until retirement. In his time at IBM he wrote 21 more publications^[2] and 6 patents that are still owned by IBM to this day.^[3]

Academic papers

• Paul Erdős; Abraham Ginzburg; Abraham Ziv (1961). "Theorem in the additive number theory" (PDF). renyi.hu. Retrieved 2015-01-12.

References

1. "zbMATH - the first resource for mathematics". zbmath.org. Retrieved 2015-01-12.
2. "Abraham Ziv". 65.54.113.26. Retrieved 2015-01-12.
3. "Patents by Inventor Abraham Ziv - Justia Patents Database". patents.justia.com. Retrieved 2015-01-12.

External links

• Hazewinkel, Michiel, ed. (2001), "Erdős-Ginzburg-Ziv theorem", Encyclopedia of Mathematics, Springer, ISBN 978-1-55608-010-4
• PlanetMath Erdős, Ginzburg, Ziv Theorem