Hans Schwerdtfeger

Hans Wilhelm Eduard Schwerdtfeger (born December 9, 1902 in Göttingen , † June 29, 1990 in Adelaide ) was a German-Australian-Canadian mathematician.

Schwerdtfeger 1964 in Montreal

Schwerdtfeger was the son of a Prussian major who fell in 1914 at the beginning of the First World War. Schwerdtfeger went to high school in Göttingen, interrupted in the period after the First World War, when he worked for the Siemens-Schuckertwerke in Berlin for financial reasons . He studied in Göttingen and at the University of Bonn , where he received his doctorate in 1935 under Otto Toeplitz with the dissertation " Contributions to the matrix calculus and the theory of the group matrix ". As an opponent of the National Socialists, he went with his family to Prague in 1936 and to Australia via Zurich and France in 1939 . In 1940 he became a lecturer at the University of Adelaide and later a senior lecturer at the University of Melbourne . In 1957 he became an associate professor at McGill University in Montreal , where he received a full professorship in 1960. In 1983 he retired there and went back to Australia as a visiting scholar at the University of Adelaide. His son Peter Schwerdtfeger, a professor of meteorology at Flinders University in Adelaide, also lived there.

Schwerdtfeger dealt with Galois theory , group theory with applications in geometry , matrix theory and function theory .

Since 1935 he was married to the mathematician Hanna Maeder, who was his fellow student in Göttingen.

In 1964 he became a member of the Royal Society of Canada . In 1979 he was editor of Gustav Herglotz's collected writings .

Fonts

• Introduction to linear algebra and the theory of matrices, Groningen, Noordhoff 1950
• Geometry of complex numbers: Circle Geometry, Möbius Transformations, Non-Euclidean Geometry, University of Toronto Press 1962
• Introduction to Group Theory, Leiden, Noordhoff International Publishing 1976
• Les fonctions des matrices, Hermann, Paris 1938

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Hans Schwerdtfeger in the Mathematics Genealogy Project (English)
2. ^ John J. O'Connor, Edmund F. Robertson :  Hans Schwerdtfeger. In: MacTutor History of Mathematics archive .