Erich Bessel-Hagen

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Erich Bessel-Hagen, 1920 in Göttingen

Erich Paul Werner Bessel-Hagen (born September 12, 1898 in Charlottenburg , † March 29, 1946 in Bonn ) was a German mathematician and mathematics historian .

ancestors

Bessel-Hagen was a son of the surgeon Fritz Karl Bessel-Hagen (1856–1945) (director of the city hospital Charlottenburg-Westend), grandson of Adolf Hermann Wilhelm Hagen (1820–1894), Berlin city treasurer, member of the Reichstag and liberal politician, his great-grandfathers were Carl Heinrich Hagen (1785-1856), lawyer, economist and professor of political science in Königsberg. and Friedrich Wilhelm Bessel , astronomer and mathematician in Königsberg. After his two sons died, the male grandchildren were given the middle name Bessel with royal permission , from which the name Bessel-Hagen arose. Bessel-Hagen's uncle Carl Ernst Bessel Hagen was a physicist and director of the Physikalisch-Technische Reichsanstalt, another uncle Werner Hagen was a Prussian diplomat.

Live and act

After graduating from high school in 1917, Bessel-Hagen studied mathematics and physics at the University of Berlin at the Kaiserin-Auguste-Gymnasium in Charlottenburg. During the First World War he was exempted from military service due to a handicap and worked in the cartographic department of the General Staff. He heard from Max Planck , Erhard Schmidt , Issai Schur , among others . In 1920 he received his doctorate from Constantin Carathéodory on discontinuous variation problems ( on a kind of singular point of simple variation problems ), an area that Carathéodory himself founded and in which he saw the work of Bessel-Hagen as an important advance and gave it the grade "valde laudabile". In addition, Bessel-Hagen, who himself spoke ancient languages ​​(Latin, Greek, Arabic), attended lectures by the famous classical philologist Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff .

After his doctorate he went to the University of Göttingen , where he was Felix Klein's private assistant from 1921 to 1924 and also lived in his house. Together with Richard Courant and Otto Neugebauer, he edited Felix Klein's lectures on the development of mathematics in the 19th century , which Klein also gave to selected students at home. In 1925 he completed his habilitation in Göttingen on elliptical module functions and became a private lecturer. In 1927 he was Helmut Hasse's assistant at the University of Halle , where he completed his habilitation, again in Bonn the following year .

In 1928/1929 he had a teaching position for the history of mathematics and mathematics education at the University of Bonn at the invitation of Otto Toeplitz , who was also very interested in the history of mathematics and promoted the historical method in mathematics lessons. Bessel-Hagen took care of the expansion of the mathematical library in Bonn (which suffered heavy losses in the Second World War). In addition to him and Toeplitz, the third “math historian” was the philosopher Oskar Becker in Bonn, and the Assyriologist Albert Schott (* 1901) and the astronomer Friedrich Becker also took part in the seminar on the history of mathematics .

In the 1930s, Bessel – Hagen was the only colleague in Bonn who was still in contact with the Jewish mathematician Felix Hausdorff , who had been forced into retirement .

Bessel-Hagen also published numerous reviews in the Zentralblatt für Mathematik of his friend Otto Neugebauer. In 1931 he became a non-official associate professor and in 1939 an adjunct professor in Bonn. During the Second World War he was heavily involved in teaching and at times the only mathematics professor at Bonn University, as most of the professors were deployed in the war.

Bessel-Hagen was very interested in the history of mathematics. He was involved in the publication of the works of Carl Friedrich Gauß and the collected works of Felix Klein. A large number of private letters from Bernhard Riemann also came into the possession of the State Library of Prussian Cultural Heritage via Bessel-Hagen . Bessel-Hagen also drew Siegel's attention to Riemann's number-theoretical estate and also looked after the estate of mathematicians from his circle of friends such as Klein, Toeplitz and Hausdorff. He was otherwise cautious by nature and published little.

Since his student days, Bessel-Hagen had been friends with Carl Ludwig Siegel , which lasted after the latter allegedly played a bad joke on him and sank his habilitation thesis, which he had been given for review, in the sea while crossing the Atlantic. Bessel-Hagen then had to laboriously rewrite it, but was then allowed to accompany Siegel on a holiday in Greece, so the anecdote formulated by Braun. Bessel-Hagen also had other versions of the work that he had also sent to his brother, the geographer Hermann Hagen , who later became director of the Ibero-American Institute in Berlin, for review. In other respects, too, Bessel-Hagen was at times the subject of jokes, to which his shyness, sickness and slow speech obviously contributed. In the lectures on topology by Béla Kerékjártó (1923), who attended in Göttingen near Bessel-Hagen in 1922, there is e.g. B. an entry on Bessel-Hagen in the table of contents, which is not mentioned on the specified page, but a picture of a torus with handles (an allusion to its "sail ears"). Even Hans Freudenthal confirmed that Bessel-Hagen was in Göttingen favorite target of pranks - on one occasion a battery were hidden alarm clocks in his bedroom, each to a different hour raised the alarm and stopped him awake at night.

literature

Web links

Notes and individual references

  1. ^ Vieweg, R .: Hagen, Carl Ernst Bessel. In: Neue Deutsche Biographie 7 (1966), p. 471 [online version]
  2. ↑ Erich Bessel-Hagen in the Mathematics Genealogy Project (English)Template: MathGenealogyProject / Maintenance / id used Template: MathGenealogyProject / Maintenance / name used
  3. ↑ Like Carl Ludwig Siegel and other students
  4. ↑ He even wrote a book about it in which he applied the "genetic method" to the theory of analysis
  5. ^ Erwin Neuenschwander Felix Hausdorff's last years of life according to documents from the Bessel-Hagen estate , in Felix Hausdorff zum Gedächtnis, Vol. 1, Vieweg, Braunschweig, 1996, pp. 253-270
  6. ↑ He left it to his brother Hermann Hagen , who handed it over to the library in 1966. Bessel-Hagen must have bought it from a bookseller during World War II. (Source: Erwin Neuenschwander in the new edition of Riemann's Collected Works).
  7. ↑ In 1932, the number theorist Siegel published the then unknown results of Riemann. They showed a much more extensive occupation of Riemann with analytical number theory than had previously been assumed. During his lifetime he had only published one essay in 1859 which contained the famous Riemann Hypothesis.
  8. ↑ This anecdote is passed down by Hel Braun in her autobiography. Siegel was supposed to go through the paper, but was tired of reading it. However, he noted the exact coordinates of the "sinking".
  9. ↑ http://www.math.osu.edu/~fiedorowicz.1/Humor/Kerekjarto1.gif
  10. ↑ http://www.math.osu.edu/~fiedorowicz.1/Humor/Kerekjarto2.gif
  11. ↑ Freudenthal, A bit of Gossip: Koebe, Mathematical Intelligencer 1984, No. 2
personal data
SURNAME Bessel-Hagen, Erich
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Bessel-Hagen, Erich Paul Werner
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German mathematician
DATE OF BIRTH September 12, 1898
PLACE OF BIRTH Berlin
DATE OF DEATH March 29, 1946
Place of death Bonn