Alfred Klose (mathematician)

Wilhelm Rudolf Alfred Klose (born September 19, 1895 in Görlitz , † February 21, 1953 in Potsdam ) was a German applied mathematician and astronomer.

Klose studied in Breslau and Göttingen from 1916 and was an assistant at the observatory in Breslau from 1917. He received his doctorate in astronomy in 1921 in Breslau with Alexander Wilkens ( studies on the movement of the planet 189 Phthia ). He then went to the University of Greifswald and its observatory, where he completed his habilitation in 1922 and was then a private lecturer. In 1923 he completed his habilitation at the Humboldt University in Berlin . In 1924 he became an associate professor of mechanics and theoretical astronomy in Riga . In 1929 he became associate professor for astronomy in Berlin and after Hilda Geiringer's departure in 1933 her successor as assistant to Theodor Vahlen at the Institute for Applied Mathematics. As an assistant he represented Vahlen, who from 1933 held a position at the Ministry of Education and concentrated on his work there, but in 1934 had succeeded Richard von Mises, who had been expelled . In 1937 he became a full professor for applied mathematics and institute director. In fact, he had been classified as unsuitable because of his specialization in astronomy. The positive classification by Ludwig Bieberbach and Theodor Vahlen - Klose was an active National Socialist - played a role in this . The institute experienced a decline and even during the Second World War no work essential to the war effort was performed there - Klose and two assistants were drafted instead. He was laboratory manager of a test center of the Army Weapons Office for rocket tests in Gottow and at the Kummersdorf firing range near Luckenwalde . On the other hand, one of his assistants, Karl-Heinz Boseck (released from military service due to illness), as a former student leader, member of the SS (he set up a department for numerical computing in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp) and fanatical National Socialist, had a great influence in the mathematics faculty during of World War II.

In 1939, Klose was also in talks about the successor to Constantin Caratheodory in Munich (including Karl Strubecker ), but this failed despite positive reports from Vahlen and Bieberbach (who were in favor of staying in Berlin) due to negative assessments by Oskar Perron . He obtained expert opinions from Ludwig Prandtl and Friedrich Pfeiffer , who had the tenor that Klose was a particularly unsuspecting ignoramus in the field of applied mathematics .

In 1945/46 he was at the successor company of GEMA in Köpenick and from 1946 to 1952 as one of the compulsory German scientists in the Soviet Union (on Gorodomlija near Ostashkow ). In 1952/53 he was a full professor for applied mathematics at the University of Rostock and commissioned to set up an aeronautical engineering faculty, which only existed there for a short time.

Pro forma Lothar Collatz is one of his doctoral students , but he was the last student of Richard von Mises to do his work under him and in 1933 he took his private state examination with him. Collatz did not habilitate in Berlin at the Klose Institute, but went to Karlsruhe and from there in 1943 to the TH Hannover.

In 1936 Klose was one of the editors of the journal Deutsche Mathematik .

literature

• Sanford Segal Mathematicians under the Nazis , Princeton University Press 2003

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Life data according to Renate Tobies , DMV
2. ↑ Dissertations 1907-1945, DMV
3. ↑ 80 Years Greifswald Observatory ( Memento from November 27, 2013 in the Internet Archive )
4. ↑ Segal, see literature, p. 323
5. ^ Litten, Caratheodory successor in Munich
6. ^ Mathematics from 1830 , Rostock University