Friedrich Engel (mathematician)

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Friedrich Engel (born December 26, 1861 in Lugau , † September 29, 1941 in Gießen ) was a German mathematician .

Engel was the son of an Evangelical Lutheran pastor and attended high school in Greiz . From 1879 he studied at the University of Leipzig , where he received his doctorate under Adolph Mayer in 1883 ( on the theory of contact transformations ). He also studied at the University of Berlin . One of his teachers in Leipzig, Felix Klein , recommended Engel to his friend Sophus Lie in order to support him in the elaboration and formulation of his work on "continuous transformation groups" (now known as Lie groups ). Lie himself always had difficulty formulating his intuitively conceived geometric ideas in an analytical form, and the two complemented each other well. Engel worked with Lie in Oslo (then Christiania) in 1884/85 and returned with him to Leipzig in 1886, where Lie succeeded Klein as professor. Her three-volume work on transformation groups appeared in 1888–1893. Engel was later the editor of the collected treatises Lies . Engel completed his habilitation in Leipzig in 1885, where he became a private lecturer, in 1889 an associate professor and in 1899 a full honorary professor. In 1904 he succeeded his friend Eduard Study as a full professor at the University of Greifswald and in 1913 at the University of Gießen , which he remained until his retirement in 1931. But he was still scientifically active afterwards.

In 1931 he and his doctoral student Karl Faber published the book Die Lie's partial differential equations of the first order (a project that Lie planned but was no longer able to carry out).

Engel helped Hermann Graßmann gain recognition by editing all of his works, and made Nikolai Iwanowitsch Lobatschewski known by translating his writings from Russian into German. Together with Paul Stäckel , he published a collection of documents on the prehistory of non-Euclidean geometry ( The theory of parallel lines from Euclid to Gauss , 1895) and, in addition to the work of Lobachevsky, also published other documents on non-Euclidean geometry (Teubner, from 1898) such as those of János Bolyai and his father Farkas Bolyai. Engel himself dealt with, among other things, partial differential equations of the first order, contact transformations and finite continuous groups, the Pfaff problem (see Johann Friedrich Pfaff ) and systems of Pfaffian forms , area theory, invariant theory of differential equations, area theory and the general integration of the n-body problem in mechanics .

He was in correspondence with Wilhelm Killing and was involved in the complete edition of Euler .

In 1910 he was president of the German Mathematicians Association . The set of angels , which the finite, nilpotent Lie algebra characterized, is connected with his name.

He was a member of the Saxon , Norwegian , Russian and Prussian Academy of Sciences , honorary doctorate in Oslo and recipient of the Lobachevsky gold medal in Kazan.

literature

  • Hermann Boerner :  Engel, Friedrich. In: New German Biography (NDB). Volume 4, Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 1959, ISBN 3-428-00185-0 , p. 501 f. ( Digitized version ).
  • Friedrich Engel: The taste in modern mathematics (Leipzig inaugural lecture) in: Herbert Beckert, Walter Purkert Leipzig mathematical inaugural lectures. Selection from the years 1869-1922 , BG Teubner, Leipzig 1987 (with biography)
  • Wolfgang Hein (editor): Wilhelm Killing - Correspondence with Friedrich Engel on the history of Lie algebras , documents on the history of mathematics, Volume 9, DMV / Vieweg 1997
  • Christoph Scriba : Friedrich Engel (1861–1941). Mathematicians , in: Giessener scholars in the first half of the 20th century, Marburg 1982, pp. 212–223
  • Arild Stubhaug: It was the boldness of my thoughts. The mathematician Sophus Lie , Springer 2000 (on Engel-Lie)
  • Walter Purkert: On the relationship between Sophus Lie and Friedrich Engel , Wiss. Journal Ernst Moritz Arndt University of Greifswald, Math. Naturw. Series, 33, 1984, pp. 29-34
  • Thomas Hawkins: Emergence of the theory of Lie groups , Springer 2000

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Mathematics Genealogy Project
  2. ↑ Engel almost finished the seventh volume with his estate work in six volumes, but it was only published later.
  3. ↑ This was published by Vieweg on behalf of DMV in 1997


personal data
SURNAME Engel, Friedrich
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German mathematician
DATE OF BIRTH December 26, 1861
PLACE OF BIRTH Lugau near Chemnitz
DATE OF DEATH September 29, 1941
Place of death to water