Boris Kaufmann

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Boris Kaufmann (also written Coifman ; born January 20, 1904 in Attiki , Bessarabia Governorate ; † around or after 1940 ) was a Russian stateless mathematician who dealt with topology .

Life and activity

Kaufmann was the son of a landlord. Due to the Russian Revolution of 1917, his family moved to Germany. Since the summer semester of 1923 he studied mathematics at the University of Heidelberg . In 1930 he received his doctorate with a dissertation supervised by Arthur Rosenthal with the title About the boundaries of flat and spatial areas . The work was about the topological concept of primends, which Constantin Caratheodory had first introduced to the theory of conformal mappings in 1913 and, with this work, Kaufmann to topology, and was awarded. The theory of the prime ends was later taken up by Stefan Mazurkiewicz (Fundamenta Mathematicae, Volume 33, 1945, pp. 177–228) and Hans Freudenthal (1952).

At the beginning of the 1930s, Kaufmann was working on his habilitation - the implementation of which was made difficult by his statelessness - but the process had to be broken off due to the rise of power by the National Socialists, which made it impossible to remain at a German university: as - according to the National Socialist definition - Jewish A stateless person from Russia, he no longer saw any prospects in Germany and moved to Great Britain via France.

After emigrating from Germany in September 1933, he wrote to the Academic Assistance Council (AAC, later SPSL, Society for the Protection of Science and Learning) in England for help, but did not receive support until 1935. Kaufmann was in Leeds until 1935 (as a special research student ), where he worked with Harold Douglas Ursell and published. Ursell became his friend and mentor, and started a relief fund for him when he fell seriously ill in 1940. Kaufmann was invited to give lectures on topology in Cambridge in 1935 and stayed there until 1938. Siegmund-Schultze quotes from the file on Kaufmann at the SPSL in the Bodleian Library in Oxford that Selig Brodetsky (Leeds) wrote in 1938 in a letter to a German committee Jewish emigrants in England recommended that Kaufmann should do another PhD in Cambridge in order to gain a foothold in English university circles. More precise information about its end is not available in the literature.

After his emigration, the National Socialist police officers classified Kaufmann as an enemy of the state: In the spring of 1940, the Reich Main Security Office in Berlin put him on the special wanted list GB , a list of people who would be succeeded by the occupying forces in the event of a successful invasion and occupation of the British Isles by the Wehrmacht Special SS commandos should be located and arrested with special priority.

Fonts

  • About the boundaries of flat and spatial areas (prime theory) , Math. Ann., Volume 103, 1930, pp. 70-144, online
  • About the assignment of margins to topological mappings in the plane and in space , meeting reports of the Heidelberg Academy of Sciences, 1930.
  • Parameter curves without semi-tangents , meeting reports of the Heidelberg Academy of Sciences, 1931.
  • About the determination of the prime ends by regular complexes, Mathematische Annalen , Volume 106, 1932, pp. 334-342, online
  • About the structure of the first-order complexes in the theory of the primends, Mathematische Annalen , Volume 106, 1932, pp. 308–333 Online
  • with Ursell: The dissection of closed surfaces and the Phragmen-Brouwer-Alexandroff theorem , Proc. Nat. Acad. USA, Volume 20, 1934
  • with Ursell: Note on reducible and irreducible dissections , Quarterly J. Math. Oxford, Ser. 6, 1935, pp. 69-73

literature

  • Renate Tobies : Biographical Lexicon in Mathematics for PhDs , 2006.

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Boris Kaufmann in the Mathematics Genealogy Project (English)Template: MathGenealogyProject / Maintenance / id used
  2. ↑ Freudenthal introduced ends in a different context in 1931 in the topology
  3. ↑ Reinhard Siegmund-Schultze: Mathematicians Fleeing from Nazi Germany: Individual Fates and Global Impact , 2009, p. 43.
  4. ^ Colin Fletcher, Refugee Mathematicians, a German Crisis and a British Response, 1933–1936, Historia Mathematica, Volume 13, 1986, p. 16
  5. ↑ Fletcher, loc. cit., p. 20. It refers to the obituary for Ursell by LC Young, Bull. London Math. Soc., Vol. 2, 1970, p. 345. It says that Kaufmann's health collapsed completely due to great poverty.
  6. ↑ Based on the textbook by Alexandroff and Hopf, see AH Stone, Some topologists of the 1940s, in: C. Aull, R. Lowen (eds.), Handbook of the History of General Topology, Volume 1, Kluwer 1997, p. 105
  7. ^ Siegmund-Schultze, Mathematicians fleeing from Nazi Germany, p. 114
  8. ^ Entry on Kaufmann on the special wanted list GB (reproduced on the website of the Imperial War Museum in London) .
personal data
SURNAME Kaufmann, Boris
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Coifman, Boris
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Russian stateless mathematician
DATE OF BIRTH January 20, 1904
PLACE OF BIRTH Attiki , Bessarabia Governorate
DATE OF DEATH after 1940