Kurt Reidemeister

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Kurt Werner Friedrich Reidemeister (born October 13, 1893 in Braunschweig ; † July 8, 1971 in Göttingen ) was a German mathematician and professor at the universities of Vienna, Königsberg , Marburg and Göttingen. He developed the Reidemeister movements , a cornerstone of knot theory , a branch of topology. He also dealt with philosophy , the democratic responsibility of the academic, and emerged as a translator for Stéphane Mallarmé ; own poems were published in 1947.

life and work

Kurt Reidemeister
Göttingen memorial plaque for Kurt Reidemeister

Kurt Reidemeister and his brother Leopold were born in Braunschweig as the sons of Hans Reidemeister, a ducal-Braunschweig government councilor, and his wife Sophie, nee. Langerfeldt, born. In 1912 Reidemeister began studying philosophy and mathematics in Freiburg im Breisgau , where he attended lectures by Edmund Husserl , among other things . He moved first to Marburg and then to Göttingen , but interrupted his studies in order to register as a war volunteer in 1914. From 1914-18 he was a soldier in World War I and was therefore only able to finish his studies in 1920. He passed his state examination in mathematics, physics, chemistry, philosophy and geology. In mathematics he was examined by Edmund Landau . Then Reidemeister went to Erich Hecke in Hamburg to accept an assistant position there. At Hecke he received his doctorate in 1921 on a topic from algebraic number theory . Reidemeister's diverse range of interests was already evident in Hamburg. He not only dealt with mathematical questions, but also took an active part in social and cultural life, including regularly writing literary columns in a Hamburg newspaper and composing poems and short novels.

In 1922 he accepted a call to an extraordinary professorship at the University of Vienna . There he came into contact with the ideas of the Vienna Circle through Hans Hahn . During his time in Vienna, Reidemeister also came to the decision to deal intensively with the knot theory. The main area of ​​work in the following years was combinatorial topology . In Vienna he also met his future wife, Elisabeth Wagner, who came from Riga . In 1925 Reidemeister accepted a call to the Albertina in Königsberg as the successor to Wilhelm Franz Meyer . During his time in Königsberg, he continued the work he had begun in Vienna on topology and knot theory. In 1926 he proved that two knot diagrams define the same knot precisely when they can be converted into one another by a sequence of Reidemeister movements .

Reidemeister's philosophical interests were expressed again when, in September 1930, four large scientific congresses were held simultaneously in Königsberg: the annual meeting of the Society of German Natural Scientists and Doctors , the annual meeting of the German Mathematicians Association , the 6th German Physicists and Mathematicians Meeting and the second meeting for Epistemology of the exact sciences . Reidemeister was involved in the organization of these congresses and invited many members of the Vienna Circle. At these conferences David Hilbert gave his famous radio lecture (“We must know - we will know”) and Kurt Gödel presented - at that time still little noticed - his results on undecidable sentences in formal logical systems.

The Königsberg student body (like the student body at almost all other German universities) increasingly fell into the waters of the anti-republican political right and the National Socialists at the end of the 1920s . There had been student unrest as early as 1930, which led to the rector's resignation. Reidemeister felt repelled by the irrational agitational thinking and action and took a stand against it in his lectures. With the seizure of power by the Nazis in 1933, he was subsequently dismissed, although he, the professor, unlike his Konigsberg mathematician colleagues Gabor Szego and the two lecturers Werner Wolfgang Rogosinski and Richard Brauer , not of Jewish origin was. The expulsion of Reidemeister from office in the spring of 1933 "showed ... the case of an intellectual whose ideal of 'precise thinking' ... came into conflict with the fascist developments in academic life and remained incompatible." (Epple)

While the three mentioned colleagues, who were also dismissed shortly after Reidemeister, had to emigrate from Germany, Reidemeister was able to obtain an appointment to Marburg , probably through the mediation of Erich Heckes , who was also hostile to National Socialism . There he continued to work in the field of topology, but increasingly withdrew into internal emigration during the National Socialist era.

In 1935 he defined a topological invariant known today under the name Reidemeister torsion , with which it was possible for the first time to distinguish homotopy-equivalent non- homeomorphic manifolds. Specifically, he proved that the lens spaces L (7,1) and L (7,2) are not homeomorphic. Further results going back to Reidemeister are the classification of the abelian groups occurring as a fundamental group of 3-manifolds and the Reidemeister-Singer theorem: every two Heegaard decompositions of a 3-manifold have a common stabilization .

In 1946 he was chairman of the German Mathematicians Association .

In 1955 he moved to Göttingen, where he died in 1971. In 1955 he was elected a full member of the Göttingen Academy of Sciences .

Heiner Zieschang was one of his doctoral students .

Publications (selection)

  • Knot theory . Results of mathematics and its border areas, volume 1. Springer, Berlin 1932
  • Introduction to combinatorial topology . Vieweg, Braunschweig 1932
  • The arithmetic of the Greeks . Leipzig-Berlin 1940 (discussed by Max Steck in Intellectual Work No. 2, born in 1941).
  • Mathematics and logic in Plato . Leipzig-Berlin 1942.
  • Complexes and homotopy chains. Bulletin of the American Mathematical Society 56: 297-307 (1950).

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Reidemeister, Kurt: Homotopieringe und Linsenzimmer Abh. Math. Sem. Univ. Hamburg 11: 102-109 (1935)
  2. ^ Reidemeister, Kurt: Commutative Fundamental Groups . Monthly Math. Phys. 43: 20-28 (1936).
  3. ^ Reidemeister, Kurt: For three-dimensional topology. Dep. Math. Semin. Hamb. Univ. 9: 189-194 (1933).
  4. ↑ Holger Krahnke: The members of the Academy of Sciences in Göttingen 1751-2001 (= Treatises of the Academy of Sciences in Göttingen, Philological-Historical Class. Volume 3, Vol. 246 = Treatises of the Academy of Sciences in Göttingen, Mathematical-Physical Class. Episode 3, vol. 50). Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen 2001, ISBN 3-525-82516-1 , p. 198.


personal data
SURNAME Reidemeister, Kurt
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Reidemeister, Kurt Werner Friedrich
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German mathematician
DATE OF BIRTH October 13, 1893
PLACE OF BIRTH Braunschweig
DATE OF DEATH July 8, 1971
Place of death Goettingen