Adolf Hurwitz

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Adolf Hurwitz

Adolf Hurwitz (born March 26, 1859 in Hildesheim , † November 18, 1919 in Zurich ) was a German mathematician .

Life

Adolf Hurwitz came from a Jewish family in Hildesheim. His father, Salomon Hurwitz (1813–1885), was a manufacturer, but not very successful in business. The mother, Elise Wertheimer (1822–1862), daughter of the Hanover banker Moses Heinemann Wertheimer, died when Adolf was 3 years old and his brothers Julius 5 and Max 13 years old. In Hildesheim, Hurwitz visited what was then the real class branch of the Andreanum . There his mathematical talent was recognized and promoted by his teacher Hermann Schubert . As a 17-year-old schoolboy, Hurwitz published his first scientific papers with his teacher.

Hurwitz began studying mathematics in 1877 at the Royal Bavarian Technical University , where Felix Klein was his main teacher. From 1877 to 1878 he studied at the Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität zu Berlin , where he attended lectures by Ernst Eduard Kummer , Karl Weierstrass and Leopold Kronecker . After Klein a call to the University of Leipzig had assumed, he was succeeded in 1880 Hurwitz there and received his doctorate in 1881 at Klein on the subject basics of Independents theory of elliptic modular functions and theory of the multiplier equations first stage . He then moved to the Georg August University of Göttingen , where he completed his habilitation and was appointed private lecturer .

In 1884, at the instigation of Ferdinand von Lindemann, he received an extraordinary position at the Albertus University in Königsberg , where he met Hermann Minkowski and David Hilbert , who were doing their doctorates there. With the latter he had a lifelong friendship. In 1892 he succeeded Ferdinand Georg Frobenius at the ETH Zurich . In 1900 he turned down Albert Einstein's application for an assistant position. He mainly dealt with number theory , but also with function theory , where he examined the gender of Riemann surfaces .

According to him, are Hurwitzquaternionen that Hurwitz polynomial , the Hurwitz zeta function and the Hurwitzkriterium from the stability theory of dynamical systems and the Riemann-Hurwitz formula from the theory of functions named. Several sentences are called theorem von Hurwitz . In function theory, for example, there is Hurwitz's theorem on sequences of holomorphic functions and Hurwitz's theorem on automorphism groups of compact Riemann surfaces. In number theory, a result about the approximation of real numbers by rational numbers is also known as Hurwitz's theorem.

In 1897, Hurwitz gave a plenary lecture at the first international mathematicians' congress in Zurich (on the development of the general theory of analytical functions in recent times).

In 1892 he married Ida Samuel (1864–1951) from Königsberg and had the children Lisbeth (1894–1983), Eva (1896–1942) and Otto Adolf (1898 – after 1985) with her.

In 1899 he fell ill with a severe kidney disease and in 1905 a kidney had to be surgically removed. The failure of the second kidney then led to his death in Zurich.

Honors

In the entrance area of ​​the Andreanum grammar school in Hildesheim, which he visited at the time, there is a plaque with a picture and the dates of his life in tribute to Adolf Hurwitz.

literature

Fonts

  • Lectures on general theory of functions and elliptic functions (= the basic teachings of the mathematical sciences in individual presentations with special consideration of the areas of application. Vol. 3, ISSN  0072-7830 ). Edited and supplemented by a section on geometric function theory by Richard Courant . Springer, Berlin 1922 (4th, increased and improved edition. With an appendix by Helmut Röhrl . Ibid. 1964, digitized version ).
  • Mathematical works. Published by the Department of Mathematics and Physics at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich. 2 volumes. Birkhäuser, Basel 1932–1933 (with memorial speech on Hurwitz by Ernst Meissner )
  • Exercises in number theory. 1891–1918 (= publication series of the ETH-Bibliothek. Vol. 32, ZDB -ID 504558-7 ). Transcription by Barbara Aquilino. Edited as a reproduced manuscript by Herbert Funk and Beat Glaus. ETH Library, Zurich 1993, doi : 10.3929 / ethz-a-001313794 .
  • Lectures on Number Theory. Edited for publication by Nikolaos kritos. Translated with some additional material (from the German) by William C. Schulz. Springer, New York et al. 1986, ISBN 0-387-96236-0 .
  • Karl Weierstrass : Introduction to the theory of analytical functions. Lecture Berlin 1878 (= documents on the history of mathematics. Vol. 4). In a transcript by Adolf Hurwitz. Edited by Peter Ullrich. Vieweg, Braunschweig et al. 1988, ISBN 3-528-06334-3 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ The collected papers of Albert Einstein, Volume 1: The early years, 1879–1902 , Nos. 77 and 81, online .