Herbert Pahlings

Herbert Pahlings (born May 12, 1939 in Krefeld ; † January 9, 2012 in Aachen ) was a German mathematician.

life and work

Herbert Pahlings studied mathematics and physics from 1959 at the Eberhard Karls University in Tübingen and the Justus Liebig University in Gießen , where he received his diploma in mathematics in 1965 and received his doctorate in 1968 from Hermann Boerner (theory of projective representations of finite groups). He then worked as an assistant in Giessen and then at Texas A&M University, and in 1973/74 he worked at Carleton University . In 1975 Pahlings completed his habilitation in Giessen and was appointed senior academic counselor. In 1979 he was appointed full professor at RWTH Aachen University, where he retired in 2004.

Pahlings dealt with group theory and representation theory of finite groups as well as modular representations and especially since his time in Aachen with algorithmic aspects of representation theory and their implementation in GAP . His textbook with his student Klaus Lux on algorithmic aspects of representation theory is a standard work and the first summary of the field of both ordinary and modular algorithmic representation theory. Pahlings is one of the developers of the program collection CAS (Character Algebra System) written in Fortran for the computation of tables of group characters , which plays an important role in the constructions of simple finite groups in the context of their classification program, for example for checking the calculations previously carried out by hand in the Atlas of finite groups ( John Horton Conway , Simon Norton , Richard A. Parker , Robert Arnott Wilson and others, University of Cambridge, 1985). In 1982 he showed how new character boards can be obtained interactively on the computer from parts of other known boards. The computer algebra system GAP, initiated by Joachim Neubüser at RWTH Aachen University in 1986 and implemented in C, emerged from CAS with the participation of Pahlings and his students . From 1995 to 2007 he was on the GAP Board of Directors.

His doctoral students included Professors Meinolf Geck , Klaus Lux, Götz Pfeiffer , Jürgen Müller and Klaus Breuer, who is significantly involved in GAP development.

Pahling was married and had three sons.

Fonts

• with Klaus Lux: Representations of Groups. A computational approach , Cambridge UP 2010

Web links

• Literature by and about Herbert Pahlings in the catalog of the German National Library
• John J. O'Connor, Edmund F. Robertson :  Herbert Pahlings. In: MacTutor History of Mathematics archive . (based on Joachim Neubüser, GAP Forum, January 29, 2012)