Helmut Ulm

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Group picture around Otto Toeplitz (left) 1930, including Helmut Ulm (left sitting on the floor), Gottfried Köthe ( sitting on the rear bench in front of the mirror), D. Vieth and Elisabeth Hagemann

Helmut Ulm (born June 21, 1908 in Gelsenkirchen ; † June 13, 1975 ) was a German mathematician.

Life

Ulm was the son of a primary school teacher in Elberfeld and attended high school in Wuppertal with the Abitur in 1926. He then studied mathematics and physics in Göttingen (1926/27), Jena (1927), Bonn (1927 to 1930), among others with Richard Courant , Erich Bessel-Hagen , Felix Hausdorff and Otto Toeplitz . In 1930 he received his doctorate summa cum laude from Otto Toeplitz in Bonn with a dissertation on countable-infinite Abelian groups ( on the theory of countable-infinite Abelian groups ). Then he was back in Göttingen, where, through Toeplitz, he gained access to Emmy Noether's circle and was Courant's assistant. From 1933 to 1935 he was involved in the publication of the collected works of David Hilbert in Göttingen with Wilhelm Magnus and Olga Taussky-Todd . Because of his negative attitude towards National Socialism - he was friends with several Jewish mathematicians - he could not do his habilitation in Göttingen. In 1933 he was one of the signatories of a petition in favor of his teacher Emmy Noether in Göttingen. In 1936 he submitted his habilitation to Heinrich Behnke in Münster . In it he generalized the elementary divider theory to infinite matrices, with which he took up an idea by Toeplitz. The habilitation was delayed and finally took place after the war in 1945. In the 1930s he was an underpaid lecturer in Münster and from August 1941 he worked part-time in the cryptographic department of the Foreign Office Pers Z , which saved him from being drafted into the Wehrmacht . At the beginning of the week he worked as a lecturer in Münster, from Thursday and the weekend at Pers Z.

After the war he became associate professor and in 1968 professor in Münster. He mainly gave courses in applied mathematics. His health was poor. In 1974 he retired. In his old field of work, Infinite Abelian Groups, he did not publish anything after the 1930s, but supervised dissertations in this field.

He made important work on the classification of infinite Abelian groups with Ulm invariants named after him.

Professors Eberhard Kaniuth and Heinz Tillmann are among his doctoral students .

Fonts

  • On the theory of the countable-infinite Abelian groups, Mathematische Annalen, Volume 107, 1933, pp. 774-803
  • On the theory of non-countable primary Abelian groups, Mathematische Zeitschrift, Volume 40, 1935, pp. 205-207
  • Elementary divider theory of infinite matrices, Mathematische Annalen, Volume 114, 1937, pp. 493-505

literature

  • R. Göbel: Helmut Ulm: his work and its impact on recent mathematics, in: Abelian group theory (Perth, 1987), Contemporary Mathematics, Volume 87, 1989, pp. 1-10
  • Stanford Segal: Mathematicians under the Nazis, Princeton UP, 2003, pp. 465-466

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b Segal, Mathematicians under the Nazis, 2003, pp. 465-466
  2. ↑ Mechthild Koreuber, Emmy Noether, the Noether School and Abstract Algebra, Springer 2015, p. 52
  3. ↑ According to Koreuber, Emmy Noether, Springer 2015, p. 330, he was an assistant in Münster from 1935 to 1937, an adjunct professor from 1937 to 1947 and a regular adjunct professor in Münster from 1947 to 1974. In the book by Koreuber (p. 305) there is also a group photo with Emmy Noether from 1931, in which he is to the left of Emmy Noether.
  4. ↑ Frode Weierud, Sandy Zabell: German mathematicians and cryptology in WWII, Cryptologia, June 2019, pp. 1–75
personal data
SURNAME Ulm, Helmut
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German mathematician
DATE OF BIRTH June 21, 1908
PLACE OF BIRTH Gelsenkirchen
DATE OF DEATH June 13, 1975