Pavel Urysohn was born in Odessa in 1898.[1] His mother died when he was little, and he entered the care of his father and sister. The family moved to Moscow in 1912, where Urysohn completed his secondary education.[2] While still at school, he worked at Shanyavsky University on an experimental project on X-ray radiation and was supervised by Petr Lazarev.[3][4]
At that time, Urysohn’s interests lay predominantly in physics. Urysohn enrolled at the Moscow State University in 1915 and earned his Bachelor of science in 1919.[1][2] There he attended the lectures of Nikolai Luzin and Dimitri Egorov, which made him turn his attention to mathematics.[4][2][1] Between 1919 and 1921, Urysohn completed a doctorate on integral equations under the supervision of Luzin.[5] He then became an assistant professor at Moscow University, and Egorov prompted him to start working in topology.[1]
By 1922, Urysohn had given topological definitions to curve, surface, and dimension, and his work attracted the attention of many prominent European mathematicians.[1][4] In the summers of 1923 and 1924, Urysohn and his friend and fellow mathematician, Pavel Aleksandrov, traveled through France, Holland, and Germany, where they met David Hilbert, Felix Hausdorff, and L. E. J. Brouwer.[1] The three European mathematicians were impressed by Urysohn’s work and expressed their hopes that he would return to Europe in subsequent years.[6]
Urysohn and Aleksandrov were staying in a cottage in Brittany, France, when Urysohn drowned at the age of 26 while swimming off the coast nearby Batz-sur-Mer.[1]
