Nicolae Culianu

Nicolae Culianu: The Man Who Built a University

In 1870 a professor in Iași published a course in differential and integral calculus. The mathematics inside it was not new; every result had been known in Paris for decades. What was new was the language. It was the first course in mathematical analysis ever printed in Romanian, and to write it Culianu had to decide what the words would be. For eighteen years afterward he ran the university that taught from it.

A Scholarship to the Sorbonne

He was born in Iași in the late summer of 1832 — sources give 28 or 29 August — into a Moldavia that had almost no scientific instruction of its own. He took his first lessons at the Trei Ierarhi school in the city, then went on to the Academia Mihăileană, the ambitious Moldavian college where he studied between 1852 and 1855 under August Treboniu Laurian. That was the ceiling of what the country could offer. Everything above it had to be imported.

In 1855 the state sent him to Paris on a scholarship, and he stayed five years. At the Sorbonne he read mathematics and astronomy under a faculty that would be recognizable to any historian of the discipline: Joseph Bertrand, Joseph Liouville, Joseph-Alfred Serret. He passed his degree examination in mathematics in 1860, and rather than come straight home he stayed on doing work at the Paris Observatory until 1863. He returned to a country that had, in the meantime, invented itself. The Principalities had united, and on 26 October 1860 Prince Alexandru Ioan Cuza had inaugurated a university in Iași — the first institution of higher education in Romania.

Provisional Professor, Permanent Fixture

The appointment came on 5 June 1863: provisional professor of differential and integral calculus. He was made permanent the following year. In 1865 he took the chair of astronomy and geodesy, and he held it, without interruption, for forty-one years, until his retirement in 1906.

The dates of his administrative career tell their own story about how thin the bench was. Dean of the sciences faculty from 1874 to 1880. Rector from 1880 to 1898 — eighteen consecutive years. Dean again from 1898 to 1906. For roughly three decades, the University of Iași was, administratively speaking, Nicolae Culianu. The 1864 education law had reorganized it into four faculties, one of them Physical, Mathematical and Natural Sciences, and it fell to men like him to make those categories mean something.

What he did with the office was structural rather than glamorous. In 1884 he fought off a threatened closure of the Faculty of Medicine, inaugurated only in 1879 and not yet strong enough to survive alone. He pushed through the construction of the Institute of Anatomy, classified as a historical monument in 2004. He organized the fiftieth-anniversary celebration of the Academia Mihăileană in 1885, an act of memory-making for a country short on institutional memory. He published the university's first Yearbook for 1895–1896. And in 1897 he presided over the move out of the cramped old quarters near Ulița Goliei into the new University Palace on Copou hill, where the institution still stands.

Inventing the Vocabulary

The textbooks were the other half of the work, and arguably the more consequential half. Between 1870 and the mid-1890s Culianu produced a shelf of them: the *Lecțiuni de calcul diferențial și integral*, an elementary algebra course that ran to five editions between 1882 and 1894, *Aplicațiuni geometrice* in 1874, courses in plane and spherical trigonometry, and a *Curs de cosmografie* in 1893 with a secondary-school version in 1895. He left unpublished manuscripts on astronomy, geodesy, and the geometry of curves.

None of this was original mathematics. All of it was necessary. A discipline cannot be taught in a language until someone has fixed the terms, and Culianu was doing that in real time, page by page, for a readership that had no alternative textbook to check him against.

He extended the same logic below the university. In 1866, with Grigore Cobălcescu, Petru Poni, Ioan Melik and Ștefan Vârgolici, he co-founded the Institutul Academic, a private Romanian-language lyceum; it merged with the Liceul Nou in 1879 to become the Institutele Unite, which ran until 1907. In 1871 he helped establish the first girls' boarding school in Iași, later the Institutul Humpel. Between 1883 and 1888 he was among the founders of *Recreații Științifice*, the first Romanian periodical devoted to mathematics and the first addressed to a young and general readership; he signed his contributions simply "C." It was the direct precursor of *Gazeta Matematică*.

Papa Culianu

Romanian students in Paris had given him a nickname — "Papa Culianu" — for his seriousness, his wisdom, and the practical help he gave younger men who came to him for advice. It followed him the rest of his life, and into Junimea, the literary society he joined at its founding in 1863 and where he was a close friend of Titu Maiorescu. He was the scientist in a room full of writers, and by surviving accounts he held his own, credited with a solid humanistic culture despite the technical training. A persistent oral tradition, unverifiable, makes him the model for the abstracted astronomer in Eminescu's *Scrisoarea a doua*; the two men certainly knew each other from Junimea evenings.

Public life followed. He served as vice-president of the Senate from 1892 to 1896 under the conservative government of Lascăr Catargiu, and from 1898 sat on Romania's General Council of Education. The Romanian Academy elected him a corresponding member in 1889; he was decorated with the Grand Cross of Romania and made a grand officer of the Star of Romania. He had married Aspazia Ciurea in 1867 and fathered eighteen children, of whom eleven reached adulthood.

The observatory took longest. He had campaigned for years for astronomical instruments for the use of students and teachers, and it was only in 1913 — seven years after his retirement, two years before his death — that Iași finally got one.

Why Nicolae Is Called a Genius

The honest answer is that Culianu was not a genius of the kind the word usually designates, and the sources do not claim he was. He proved no theorem that bears his name. He made no discovery at the Paris Observatory or afterward. His mathematical publications were pedagogical: careful, competent transmissions of results established by others. The Romanian Academy made him a corresponding member, not a titular one, which is a reasonable measure of how his contemporaries in the discipline rated his research.

What he had instead was a rarer and less celebrated faculty: the ability to see, correctly, what a country did not yet have, and then to spend forty years supplying it in the right order. Vocabulary first, then textbooks, then schools that could feed a university, then a journal that could catch talented children early, then the buildings, then the instruments. Each of those decisions is obvious in retrospect and was not obvious at the time; plenty of his equally well-trained contemporaries came home from Paris and simply lectured. The specific quality is institutional imagination under scarcity — knowing that a discipline is a supply chain, not a set of ideas, and having the patience to build the chain rather than the reputation. It is a form of intelligence that leaves behind no citations, only a functioning system. Calling it genius stretches the word; calling it merely administration understates it badly.

Legacy

He died in Iași on 28 November 1915 and was buried in the Eternitatea Cemetery. The university he ran for eighteen years is now Alexandru Ioan Cuza University; the Copou building he opened is its face. His brother Petru also taught mathematics at the Iași science faculty. And his great-grandson, Ioan Petru Culianu, became a historian of religions of international standing before he was assassinated at the University of Chicago in 1991 at the age of forty-one — a dark coda to a family line that began with a patient man building lecture halls.

Achievements

• Held posts at Alexandru Ioan Cuza University