Ernst August Weiss

Ernst August Weiss

Ernst August Weiss , also Weiss, (born May 5, 1900 in Strasbourg ; † February 9, 1942 near Ilmensee ) was a German mathematician .

Life

White was the son of a retired officer, his mother was an Alsatian whose parents had owned a hotel in Cannes. He went to high school in Metz, Münster and Berlin (Mommsen-Gymnasium, Charlottenburg) and graduated from high school in 1917. One of his teachers was Hans Beck , a pupil of Eduard Study and after the First World War his assistant in Bonn (later, however, he became enemies of Study, because the latter considered him incompetent) and from 1920 professor. After that he was a pioneer on the front lines in Reims and Soissons. In 1918 he was captured by the Americans and spent a year as a prisoner of war. In the First World War he received the Iron Cross 2nd Class and the Badge of Honor for Frontline Fighters and was most recently a lieutenant. From 1919 he studied mathematics in Hanover, Hamburg and Bonn, where he received his doctorate in 1924 under Eduard Study (dissertation A spatial analogue to the Hessian transmission principle ). Afterwards he was an assistant and after his habilitation in 1926 private lecturer in Bonn. His protégé Beck, who recommended him to Study, considered the kind of geometry that Weiss practiced (geometry in the style of Study) to be too narrow and out of date, but Study prevailed with the completion of his habilitation (Segal in Amphora, p . 697). He then spent two semesters with Elie Cartan in Paris and Adolphe Bühl in Toulouse. In 1932 he became an associate professor in Bonn. In 1933 he joined the SA, in which he became a brigade adjutant in 1936. In 1933 he published a pamphlet Why Mathematics? , in which he advocated the holding of mathematical labor camps for students and held the first such labor camp in the castle ruins of Kronenburg in the Eifel in the spring of 1934 . In it, mathematical studies were combined with sports, hiking and lessons in the National Socialist worldview, similar to SA education camps. The lessons were based on lectures from the previous semester (mostly geometry) and, according to Weiss' pamphlet, were aimed at leading to an independent mathematical way of thinking (to serve less immediate knowledge advances in mathematics). According to Weiss, mathematics was primarily used for character formation. There were also some women among the participants. Another labor camp took place in the same place in the autumn of the same year, and more followed until 1938 (a sixth meeting in 1939 did not take place). They also found attention and imitators beyond Bonn, and in 1938 Ludwig Bieberbach even organized a three-day camp meeting for mathematicians in Bernau.

In 1941 he was appointed to a full professorship in Posen, although Weiss was already in the Wehrmacht at that time.

In contrast to Bieberbach, he did not see any special German mathematics in terms of content , but rather the personal approach as national typical. He admired Galois and Poncelet, whose style he contrasted with that of Cauchy, who was less appealing to white. White himself dealt with geometry with 52 publications. He published a lot in the journal Deutsche Mathematik but also, for example, in the Annales de Toulouse. Results and reports from the mathematical labor camps were also published there. He wrote an obituary for his teacher Study in the meeting reports of the Berlin Mathematical Society and in the newspaper L 'Enseignement Mathématique (1930).

White was last as captain of the pioneers in the Kesselschlacht von Demjansk and was seriously wounded in hand-to-hand combat as part of a German counterattack on February 4, 1942. He died a few days later as a result of being shot in the stomach in the field hospital.

In 1939 he became an honorary member of the Romanian Institute of Science.

He was married to Eva Renate Bidder, who had a doctorate in physics.

literature

• Wilhelm Blaschke : EA Weiß , Annual Report of the German Mathematicians Association, Volume 52, 1942, pp. 174–176 (with list of publications)
• Karl Strubecker : EA Weiss , Deutsche Mathematik, Volume 7, 1943, pp. 254-298
• Stanford Segal: Ernst August Weiss: Mathematical Pedagogical Innovation in the Third Reich , in: Sergei S. Demidov, Menso Folkerts, David Rowe, Christoph Scriba (eds.), Amphora - Festschrift for Hans Wussing on the Occasion of his 65th Birthday, Birkhäuser 1992, pp. 693-704

Fonts

• Introduction to line geometry and kinematics, Teubner 1935
• Point row geometry, Teubner 1939
• Octaves, Engelscher Complex, Triality Principle, Mathematische Zeitschrift, Volume 44, 1939, pp. 580-611

Individual evidence

1. ^ ^{A b c} Sanford L. Segal, Ernst August Weiss: Mathematical Pedagogical Innovation in the Third Reich, in: Amphora, Birkhäuser 1992
2. ↑ Paper 50.0402.01 in the yearbook on the progress of mathematics , online
3. ↑ The habilitation thesis was published as: On the connection of the Weddle surface and the common tangents of two surfaces of the 2nd order , Journal für Reine und Angewandte Mathematik, Volume 159, 1928
4. ↑ ^{a b} Obituary by Wilhelm Blaschke, DMV annual report 1942