Friedrich Wilhelm Levi

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Friedrich Wilhelm Levi (1930)

Friedrich Wilhelm Levi (born February 6, 1888 in Mulhouse , Alsace , † January 1, 1966 in Freiburg im Breisgau ) was a German mathematician who dealt with combinatorial topology and group theory.

Life

From 1906 Levi studied mathematics and physics in Würzburg, Strasbourg, Leipzig and Göttingen. In 1911 he received his doctorate summa cum laude with Heinrich Weber at the University of Strasbourg with the dissertation Areas of Integrity and the Body Third Degree . In 1914 he submitted his habilitation, which took place only after his military service from the beginning of the war to November 1918 as a Saxon field artilleryman in the First World War in 1919 in Leipzig (Abelian groups with countable elements). In 1919 he became a private lecturer and in 1923 a non-scheduled adjunct professor at the University of Leipzig until he was dismissed in 1935 for racist reasons. His license to teach had already been revoked in 1933. At the same time, four other Jewish scholars teaching there were dismissed, who, like Levi, had been exempt from dismissal due to their participation in the First World War. Five members of the Philosophical Faculty protested and complained about a violation of the law at the meeting in which the rector Felix Krueger announced this (the instruction came from the Reich governor of Saxony Martin Mutschmann ). The protest was led by Bartel Leendert van der Waerden ; Friedrich Hund , Werner Heisenberg , Bernhard Schweitzer and Konstantin Reinhardt were also involved . Heisenberg later reported in his book The Part and the Whole from 1971 that he and some other professors such as van der Waerden were even considering resigning, but a conversation with Max Planck in Berlin then convinced him that this would not be of any use The National Socialists were not ready to talk (Planck had previously tried to talk to Hitler himself).

In 1935 he fled Germany from the Nazis and in 1936 accepted an offer from the University of Calcutta as head of the mathematics department ( Hardinge Professor of higher mathematics ). His mother and sister stayed in Germany and were murdered in the Holocaust .

After he had reached the retirement age of 60 in Calcutta in 1948, he held a temporary position as professor at the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research in Mumbai , India, until 1952 . For various reasons (according to Volker Remmert, he felt connected to the German mathematical culture and had only limited access to German literature in India, his pension was meager and he had health problems in the hot climate of India) he sought to return to Europe, although he was in India was respected. He came to Europe in 1950 for a series of lectures and visited Oberwolfach, among others, and was visiting professor in Freiburg in 1951. Through the efforts of Richard Courant , Hermann Ludwig Schmid and Friedrich Karl Schmidt and others, he became a full professor at the Free University of Berlin in 1952, despite initial resistance at the faculty, where he was considered too old. In 1956 he retired. He then taught in Freiburg as an honorary and visiting professor (he took over the lectures of Wilhelm Süss, who died in 1958 ). He gave his last lecture in Kuno Fladt's seminar on his 75th birthday. He died after a walk on New Years Day 1966 in Freiburg.

According to R. Narasimhan, he had considerable influence on the development of mathematics in India, particularly through the introduction of modern algebra during his time at the University of Calcutta.

Works

  • Abelian groups with enumerable elements . BG Teubner, Leipzig [1919]. (Habilitation thesis, University of Leipzig)
  • Geometric configurations . Hirzel, Leipzig 1929.
  • Reinhold Baer and Friedrich Levi: Edges of topological spaces . Hirzel, Leipzig 1930.
  • On the fundamentals of analysis. Six lectures delivered in February 1938 at the University of Calcutta . University of Calcutta, Calcutta 1939.
  • FW Levi and RN Sen: Plane geometry . Calcutta 1939.
  • Finite geometrical systems. Six public lectures delivered in February 1940 at the University of Calcutta . University of Calcutta, Calcutta 1942.
  • Algebra . University of Calcutta, Calcutta 1942.

literature

  • Volker Remmert : Forms of remigration. Emigré jewish mathematicians and germany in the immediate postwar period, Mathematical Intelligencer, 2015, No. 1
  • Otto H. Kegel, Volker Remmert: Friedrich Wilhelm Daniel Levi (1888-1966) , in: Gerald Wiemers (Hrsg.): Sächsische Lebensbilder . Vol. 5, Leipzig and Stuttgart 2003, pp. 395-403
  • Maximilian Pinl: Colleagues in a dark time. III. Part . In: Annual Report of the German Mathematicians Association , Volume 73 (1971/72), pp. 153–208, especially pp. 188–191 ( digitized version )
  • Karl Strubecker:  Levi, Friedrich. In: New German Biography (NDB). Volume 14, Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 1985, ISBN 3-428-00195-8 , p. 395 f. ( Digitized version ).

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ In addition to Levi, these were the Assyriologist Benno Landsberger , the theologian Joachim Wach , the doctor Siegfried Bettmann , and the photo chemist Fritz Weigert .
  2. ↑ Alexander Soifer , The Scholar and the State. In Search of van der Waerden, Birkhäuser 2015, p. 115f. With English translation of documents. Konstantin Reinhardt (1904, Saint Petersburg, 1976, New Haven) was a Nordic philologist. He went to the USA in 1938.
  3. ↑ The Part and the Whole, Chapter 12, Revolution and University Life (1933)
  4. ^ Karl Friedrich Bonhoeffer , van der Waerden, dog
  5. ↑ Max Pinl, Colleagues in Dark Times, Part III, p. 189
  6. ^ Raghavan Narasimhan The coming of age of mathematics in India , in Michael Atiyah et al. a. Miscellanea Mathematica , Springer Verlag 1991, p. 246
personal data
SURNAME Levi, Friedrich Wilhelm
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German scientist
DATE OF BIRTH February 6, 1888
PLACE OF BIRTH Mulhouse
DATE OF DEATH January 1, 1966
Place of death Freiburg in Breisgau