Henryk Minc - A Biography

I first met Henryk Minc in September 1958 when he arrived in Vancouver, Canada, with his Scottish born wife Cathie and their three sons. That year he was appointed as Lecturer in Mathematics at the University of British Columbia. He was then just at the beginning of his mathematical career although he was already a veteran of World War II with a history of three escapes from the Nazis, eight years of military service, and expertise in military construction. His history is not that of a typical American mathematician. Even his mathematical fields of interest at that time, nonassociative algebras and intuitionist foundations of mathematics, were rather unusual. Henryk Minc was born on November 12, 1919, in Lódź, Poland. He attended a private school from which he graduated in 1937. In 1938, he was admitted to Université de Liège in Belgium. When he returned to Poland for summer vacation in August 1939 he could hardly have anticipated that his studies would be interrupted for thirteen years. On September 1 the Germans invaded Poland, and eight days later they entered Lódź. Minc remained in occupied Poland, with his parents and two brothers, until November 16, 1939, when he succeeded in escaping from Poland to Belgium. His older brother who attempted a similar escape a week later was not as fortunate. The Belgians sent him back to Germany condemning him to more than five years of Nazi occupation. Henryk’s two brothers survived the war, but his parents did not. They perished in Auschwitz in August 1944. On May 10, 1940, the Germans invaded Belgium. Minc escaped on foot to France where he joined the Polish Army. Unfortunately the Allies were defeated in a few weeks. At the end of June Minc was evacuated with a Polish engineer company to England. Most Polish Army units that managed to escape from France were sent to Scotland and remained there until the allied invasion in 1944. Minc’s company was engaged in fortifying the beaches of Scotland. InMay 1941Minc was posted to an officer engineer school in Dundee, and in 1944 he was commissioned as a second lieutenant. At that time he was involved mainly in dismantling minefields. He was in charge inter alia

[1]  H. Minc.  Inverse elementary divisors problem for doubly stochastic matrices , 1982 .

[2]  Henryk Minc,et al.  Eigenvalues of matrices with prescribed entries , 1972 .

[3]  M. Marcus,et al.  A Survey of Matrix Theory and Matrix Inequalities , 1965 .

[4]  M. Marcus,et al.  On the relation between the determinant and the permanent , 1961 .

[5]  M. Marcus,et al.  The Pythagorean theorem in certain symmetry classes of tensors , 1962 .

[6]  H. Minc.  On a conjecture of R.A. Brualdi , 1987 .

[7]  Henryk Minc,et al.  Bounds for permanents of non-negative matrices , 1969, Proceedings of the Edinburgh Mathematical Society.

[8]  H. Minc.  The van der Waerden Permanent Conjecture , 1983 .

[9]  Marvin Marcus,et al.  The Permanent Function , 1962, Canadian Journal of Mathematics.

[10]  Henryk Minc,et al.  Linear transformations on nonnegative matrices , 1974 .

[11]  M. Marcus,et al.  Elementary linear algebra , 1968 .

[12]  H. Minc.  A note on an inequality of M. Marcus and M. Newman , 1963 .

[13]  H. Minc.  An asymptotic solution of the multidimensional dimer problem , 1980 .

[14]  Henryk Minc.  Theory of permanents 1982–1985 , 1987 .

[15]  Doubly stochastic matrices with minimal permanents , 1975 .

[16]  Henryk Minc,et al.  On the Matrix Equation X′X = A , 1962, Proceedings of the Edinburgh Mathematical Society.

[17]  J. M. Robinson.  The Institute for Antiquity and Christianity , 1970, New Testament Studies.

[18]  T. MacRobert.  SOME INTEGRALS INVOLVING LEGENDRE AND BESSEL FUNCTIONS , 1940 .

[19]  The maximum number of equal non-zero subdeterminants , 1960 .

[20]  Monotonicity of permanents of doubly stochastic matrices , 1978 .

[21]  Henryk Minc.  Evaluation of Permanents , 1979 .

[22]  W. J. Thron,et al.  Encyclopedia of Mathematics and its Applications. , 1982 .

[23]  Marvin Marcus,et al.  SOME RESULTS ON NON-NEGATIVE MATRICES , 1961 .

[24]  On matrices with positive inverses , 1963 .

[25]  An unresolved conjecture on permanents of (0,1)-Matrices * , 1974 .

[26]  H. Minc.  (0, 1)-matrices with minimal permanents , 1973 .

[27]  On a conjecture of R.F. Scott (1881) , 1979 .

[28]  H. Minc.  Nearly decomposable matrices , 1972 .

[29]  M. Marcus,et al.  On a conjecture of B. L. van der Waerden , 1967, Mathematical Proceedings of the Cambridge Philosophical Society.

[30]  Subpermanents of doubly stochastic matrices , 1975 .

[31]  Diagonals of nonegative matrices , 1973 .

[32]  Disjoint pairs of sets and incidence matrices , 1963 .

[33]  Enumeration of Indices of given Altitude and Potency , 1959 .

[34]  M. Marcus,et al.  Some results on doubly stochastic matrices , 1962 .

[35]  H. Minc.  A Problem in Partitions: Enumeration of Elements of a given Degree in the free commutative entropic cyclic Groupoid , 1959 .

[36]  Mutability of bifurcating root-trees , 1960 .

[37]  On the permanent of doubly stochastic matrices with zero diagonal , 1989 .

[38]  Frank Harary,et al.  Which Nonnegative Matrices are Self-Inverse? , 1976 .

[39]  M. Marcus,et al.  Extensions of classical matrix inequalities , 1968 .

[40]  Inverse elementary divisor problem for nonnegative matrices , 1981 .

[41]  On two theorems of Frobenius. , 1975 .

[42]  Henryk Minc.  Theory of permanents 1978–1981 , 1983 .

[43]  Linear transformations on matrices: rank 1 preservers and determinant preservers , 1977 .

[44]  H. Minc,et al.  Some Inequalities involving (r!)1/r , 1964, Proceedings of the Edinburgh Mathematical Society.

[45]  Henryk Minc,et al.  On the Maximal Eigenvector of a Positive Matrix , 1970 .

[46]  DIAGONAL PRODUCTS IN DOUBLY STOCHASTIC MATRICES , 1965 .

[47]  Henryk Minc,et al.  Permanents of (0, 1)-Circulants , 1964, Canadian Mathematical Bulletin.

[48]  Henryk Minc,et al.  Upper bounds for permanents of $\left( {0,\,1} \right)$-matrices , 1963 .

[49]  H. Minc.  A lower bound for permanents of (0,1)-matrices , 1967 .

[50]  Henryk Minc,et al.  Permanental compounds and permanents of (0, 1)-circulants , 1987 .

[51]  M. Marcus,et al.  Generalized matrix functions , 1965 .

[52]  R. Bellman,et al.  A Survey of Matrix Theory and Matrix Inequalities , 1965 .

[53]  H. Minc.  Spectra of irreducible matrices , 1975 .

[54]  M. Marcus,et al.  Permutations on symmetry classes , 1967 .

[55]  A Remark on a Theorem of M. Hall , 1974, Canadian Mathematical Bulletin.

[56]  Minimum permanents of doubly stochastic matrices with prescribed zero entries on the main diagonal , 1994 .

[57]  XXI.—Index Polynomials and Bifurcating Root-Trees * , 1957 .

[58]  Marvin Marcus,et al.  Modern University Algebra , 1968 .

[59]  H. Minc.  The invariance of elementary symmetric functions , 1976 .

[60]  Minimum permanents of doubly stochastic matrices with prescribed zero entries , 1984 .

[61]  An upper bound for the multidimensional dimer problem , 1978 .

[62]  Henryk Minc,et al.  Recurrence formulas for permanents of (0, 1)-circulants , 1985 .

[63]  M. Marcus,et al.  The invariance of symmetric functions of singular values. , 1962 .

[64]  Henryk Minc.  An inequality for permanent of (0, 1)-matrices , 1967 .

[65]  M. Marcus,et al.  Inequalities for general matrix functions , 1964 .