József Kürschák received his doctorate from Budapest in 1890 and then taught in Budapest, at the Technical University, for the whole of his career.
In [3] the authors describe a paper by Kürschák written in 1898 in which a regular dodecagon inscribed in a unit circle is investigated. A trigonometric argument can be used to show that its area of the dodecagon is 3 but Kürschák gives a purely geometric proof. He proves that the dodecagon can be dissected into a set of triangles which can be rearranged so as to fill three squares with sides having length 1.
Kürschák's most important work, however, was in 1912 when he founded the theory of valuations. His work was inspired by earlier work of Julius König, Steinitz and Hensel. The importance of Kürschák's valuations is that they allow notions of convergence and limits be used in the theory of abstract fields and greatly enrich the topic.
Von Neumann was one of Kürschák's students.