Gustav Doetsch

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Gustav Doetsch, 1930 in Jena

Gustav Heinrich Adolf Doetsch (born November 29, 1892 in Cologne , † June 9, 1977 in Freiburg - Günterstal ) was a German mathematician who is best known for his development of the theory of Laplace transformation .

Life

Doetsch attended the Wöhler Realgymnasium in Frankfurt am Main from 1904 to 1911 and then studied mathematics, physics, insurance and philosophy in Göttingen , Munich and Berlin until 1914 . During the First World War he was an artillery observer (from 1916 as a lieutenant in the Fliegerkorps from an airplane) and was even suggested for the Pour le Mérite - the end of the war prevented the award.

After the war, he continued to study in Frankfurt and Göttingen, where he received his doctorate under Edmund Landau in 1920 (“A new generalization of Borel's summability theory for divergent series”). In 1921 he completed his habilitation at the University of Hanover , was a private lecturer in applied mathematics in Halle from 1922 to 1924 , then a full "Professor of Descriptive Geometry" in Stuttgart until 1931 and then until his retirement in 1961 at the University of Freiburg.

After the Second World War , where from 1940 he served as captain of the reserve (later major) in the Reich Ministry of Aviation as an organizer of aviation research (from 1944 headed the theoretical ballistics department in the aviation research center "Hermann Göring" in Braunschweig ), he became a professor in Freiburg until 1951 suspended.

During the Weimar Republic he was still an active pacifist. He supported z. B. 1931 an appeal from Emil Julius Gumbel and distanced himself from the center because of the construction of an armored cruiser in 1928 . In the 1930s he represented National Socialist positions, resigned from the Church in 1931 and welcomed the expulsion of Jewish mathematicians such as those of his teacher Landau and his co-author Felix Bernstein from their offices in 1933 . In the German Mathematicians Association he supported Ludwig Bieberbach in 1934 in the propagation of German mathematics , when he had to resign because of his open letter to Harald Bohr . He was not in the NSDAP and was constantly exposed to hostility from the National Socialists because of his pacifist past. From 1936/1937 his enthusiasm for the cause of the National Socialists seems to have subsided. During the war he worked most of the time in the research department of the mathematics department of the Hermann Göring Aviation Research Institute in Braunschweig . Here his position deteriorated over time. This probably had to do with his lack of influence over important persons of the Third Reich and his direct, uncomfortable character.

His suspension after the war, mainly at the instigation of Wilhelm Süss (one of his main competitors in the scientific organization in the Third Reich), was mainly because of denunciations he was accused of. Among other things, he denounced Ernst Zermelo because he refused to begin his lectures with the Hitler salute. Although he was reinstated, he was largely isolated in Freiburg, where he was almost unanimously rejected. He avoided the mathematics faculty, did not attend faculty meetings and gave his lectures not in the mathematics faculty building but in the main building of the university. In 1950 he was visiting professor in Santa Fe (Argentina) , in 1952 in Madrid and in 1953 in Rome .

Although he created an important tool for many applications (electrical engineering, control engineering) with the expansion of the theory of Laplace transformation, he was skeptical of the applications of mathematics, as his inaugural lecture in Halle, which was highly regarded at the time, showed in the annual report of the German Mathematicians Association in 1922. He carried out his fundamental work on the Laplace transformation in the 1920s, partly in collaboration with Felix Bernstein.

Doetsch was a member of the German Peace Society and the Peace Association of German Catholics as well as a member of the Royal Spanish Academy of Sciences and the Heidelberg Academy of Sciences .

Fonts

literature

  • Volker Remmert: Handle from the ivory tower. Mathematicians, power and National Socialism: the example of Freiburg . DMV-Mitteilungen 1999, pp. 13–24.
  • Remmert: Mathematicians at War: Power Struggles in Nazi Germany's Mathematical Community: Gustav Doetsch and Wilhelm Süss . Revue d'histoire des mathématiques, Vol. 5, 1999, pp. 7-59.
  • Remmert: Officer - Pacifist - Officer: the mathematician Gustav Doetsch (1892-1977) . in: Military History Journal , Vol. 59, 2000, pp. 139–160
  • Dieter Hoffmann, Mark Walker: Physicists between autonomy and adaptation: The German physical society in the third realm , Wiley-VCH, 2007, ISBN 3527405852 .

Web links

Remarks

  1. ↑ Süss was chairman of the German Mathematicians Association from 1937 to 1945, director of the Institute for Mathematics Didactics in Freiburg from 1934 to 1958, first head of the Oberwolfach Mathematical Research Center and from 1940 to 1945 rector of the University of Freiburg
  2. ↑ Personal article on leo-bw.de
  3. ^ Gabriele Dörflinger: Mathematics in the Heidelberg Academy of Sciences . 2014, pp. 18-19.
personal data
SURNAME Doetsch, Gustav
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Doetsch, Gustav Heinrich Adolf (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German mathematician
DATE OF BIRTH November 29, 1892
PLACE OF BIRTH Cologne
DATE OF DEATH June 9, 1977
Place of death Freiburg - Günterstal