Hellmuth Kneser

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Hellmuth Kneser (born April 16, 1898 in Dorpat , † August 23, 1973 in Tübingen ) was a German mathematician .

Hellmuth Kneser, ca.1930.

life and work

Hellmuth Kneser, 1920 in Göttingen

Hellmuth Kneser was the son of the mathematician Adolf Kneser and studied from 1916 at the University of Breslau , where his father was now a mathematics professor and where he a. a. Attended lectures by Erhard Schmidt . He then went to Göttingen , where he received his doctorate with David Hilbert in 1921 with investigations on quantum theory (published in Mathematische Annalen Vol. 84, 1921). In 1922 he became a private lecturer in Göttingen because of his work on the determination of all regular families of curves on closed surfaces.

In 1925 he was appointed associate professor to succeed Johann Radon at the University of Greifswald and in 1937 professor at the Eberhard Karls University of Tübingen . He supported Wilhelm Süss in ensuring that the Mathematical Research Institute Oberwolfach in the Black Forest could be continued after 1945. From 1958 to 1959, Kneser succeeded Süss as scientific director of the Oberwolfach Institute.

Kneser was a member of the SA and the NSDAP .

Kneser worked in many areas of mathematics such as topology , group theory , almost periodic functions , differential geometry , iteration of analytical functions, uniformization theory, value distribution of meromorphic functions and game theory . He introduced the concept of normal surfaces ( later expanded by Wolfgang Haken ) and thus proved the existence of a prime decomposition of 3-manifolds (later further developed by John Milnor ) as a connected sum of irreducible manifolds and products of form . In 1926 he proposed that every manifold is triangulable . It was later shown that this is only true up to three dimensions ( Andrew Casson , Ciprian Manolescu and others).

He was editor of the Mathematische Zeitschrift , the Archiv der Mathematik and the Aequationes Mathematicae , 1954 President of the German Mathematicians Association and in the executive committee of the International Mathematical Union . He had been a member of the Heidelberg Academy of Sciences since 1958 and of the Finnish Academy of Sciences and the Göttingen Academy of Sciences since 1963 .

His brother Hans Otto Kneser was a physicist. His son Martin Kneser was also a well-known mathematician.

Fonts

  • Function theory. Studia Mathematica, Göttingen, 1958, 2nd edition 1966.
  • Gerhard Betsch, Karl H. Hofmann (eds.): Collected papers , De Gruyter 2005

literature

  • Wielandt: Obituary . in: Yearbook of the Heidelberg Academy of Sciences . 1974, pp. 87-89.
  • Wielandt: Hellmuth Kneser in Memoriam. Aequationes Mathematicae, Vol. 11, 1974, p. 120a.

Web links

Commons : Hellmuth Kneser  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Single receipts

  1. ↑ Freddy Litten: The Carathedory Succession in Munich, Centaurus. International Magazine of the History of Mathematics, Science, and Technology, Volume 37, Issue 2, 1994, pp. 154-172
  2. ↑ Kneser, The Topology of Manifolds, Annual Report DMV, Volume 34, 1926, pp. 1-14
  3. ^ Gabriele Dörflinger: Mathematics in the Heidelberg Academy of Sciences . 2014, p. 31.

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personal data
SURNAME Kneser, Hellmuth
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German mathematician
DATE OF BIRTH April 16, 1898
PLACE OF BIRTH Dorpat
DATE OF DEATH 23rd August 1973
Place of death Tübingen