Chaim Müntz

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Chaim Müntz (born August 28, 1884 in Lodz , † April 17, 1956 in Sweden ; also Herman Müntz , originally Minc ) was a Polish-German mathematician who dealt with analysis and minimal surfaces.

Life

Müntz was born into a secular Jewish family in Lodz in what was then the Russian part of Poland ( Congress Poland ). From 1902 he studied at the University of Berlin (among others with Hermann Amandus Schwarz , Friedrich Schottky , Ferdinand Georg Frobenius , Johannes Knoblauch , Edmund Landau ) and received his doctorate there in 1910 with Schwarz (and Schottky) "magna cum laude" ( on the boundary value problem of the partial differential equation the minimum areas ). In 1911 he went to Munich (to Aurel Voss , Alfred Pringsheim , Ferdinand von Lindemann ), where his habilitation (as well as later) came to nothing despite the advocacy of some of his teachers. From 1914 he became a teacher at various reform schools (1914 at the Odenwald School near Heppenheim , 1915 at the Dürerschule in Hochwaldhausen , then at his own boarding school in Heppenheim).

In 1919 he became a German citizen. After a nervous breakdown, he briefly retired to Poland in 1920, where his wife's parents were farmers. In 1921 he moved to Göttingen. He translated, gave private tuition and wrote scientific papers and reviews for the "Yearbook on the Advances in Mathematics". From 1924 he was in Berlin, where he was Albert Einstein's assistant for a few months from 1927 (as was Cornelius Lanczos at the same time ). However, his efforts for a university position were hampered by the fact that he was not qualified as a professor. In 1929 he moved to Leningrad , where he had a post at the university, where he taught, held administrative duties and edited Lyapunov's classic book on the balance of dynamic systems. He received the equivalent of a habilitation in Leningrad and served as a professor at the university.

In 1932 he was in the Soviet delegation to the International Congress of Mathematicians in Zurich (with his friend Chebotaryov , Pavel Alexandrow and the communist ideologist Kolman). In 1937 he was expelled from the Soviet Union (as part of a wave of political purges) and went to Sweden via Tallinn in 1938 , where he became a Swedish citizen in 1953. He made a living from private lessons. After he had eye problems in Leningrad, he went blind in the last years of his life. His wife, who had a cerebral haemorrhage in Leningrad, died in 1949.

plant

In 1914 he proved a conjecture by Sergei Bernstein (1912) about the approximation of continuous functions by power functions with a positive sequence of exponents whose reciprocal sum diverges ( Otto Szász gave another proof ) (Müntz's theorem). The well-known approximation theorem from Weierstrass only concerned the approximation by polynomials more generally. Müntz is known for important work on the plateau problem (existence of a minimal area for a given edge). His work has been criticized by Tibor Radó , and the solution is attributed to the independent work of Jesse Douglas and Tibor Rado in 1930 (for which Douglas received the first Fields Medal ). Other work by Müntz concerned heat conduction problems, projective geometry and axioms of geometry, geometry of numbers, integral equations (a textbook of his appeared in Russia in 1934 on integral equations), iteration methods for determining the eigenvalues ​​of matrices (even before Richard von Mises ) and partial differential equations.

Müntz had broad intellectual interests (particularly influenced by Goethe and Nietzsche ), was a letter partner of Martin Buber (who also lived in Heppenheim from 1916) and also wrote on questions of Judaism. In 1907 he published a book We Jews in Berlin (dedicated to Nietzsche). In it he takes a secular, socialist Zionist standpoint. He also wrote articles in Buber's newspaper "Der Jude".

Fonts

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Müntz: About Weierstrass's approximation theorem. In: Festschrift for HA Schwarz. Berlin 1914, pp. 303-312.

literature

Web links

personal data
SURNAME Müntz, Chaim
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Müntz, Herman; Minc
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Polish-German mathematician
DATE OF BIRTH August 28, 1884
PLACE OF BIRTH Lodz , Poland
DATE OF DEATH April 17, 1956
Place of death Sweden