Hermann Brunn

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Hermann Karl Brunn (born August 1, 1862 in Rome , † September 20, 1939 in Munich ) was a German mathematician who dealt with convex geometry , an Arabist, librarian and translator.

Childhood and school

Hermann Brunn was the son of Ida Brunn, née Bürkner and Heinrich Brunn , both from Anhalt . His mother was a merchant's daughter from Oranienbaum, his father was an archaeologist and later a secretary of the Royal Prussian Archaeological Institute. Brunn was born as the oldest of 3 children on the Capitol in Rome. From the age of three in 1865, the family lived in Munich, where he stayed for the rest of his life. From 1872 to 1880 he attended the Maximiliansgymnasium . The artistic impressions of his parents' house impressed him so much that he was hesitant to decide to study mathematics.

Education

Brunn studied mathematics at the Ludwig Maximilians University in Munich, among others with Alfred Pringsheim , physics and Arabic, which he completed with the teaching examination - interrupted by one year of military service.

In 1884/85 Brunn studied in Berlin with Karl Weierstrass , Leopold Kronecker and Lazarus Fuchs . However, he was little influenced by his teachers and leaned towards geometry in the sense of Jakob Steiner . In 1887 he received his doctorate in Munich ( On ovals and egg surfaces ). In his dissertation, Brunn laid the foundation for a theory of convex bodies, named after him and Hermann Minkowski, which became known as the Brunn-Minkowski theory . Here the Brunn-Minkowski inequality is named after both.

Career

In 1889, Brunn completed his habilitation with work on curves without turning points .

Under the influence of Walther von Dyck , he also dealt with topology or knot theory , in which Brunn's entanglements or concatenations in knot theory are named after him. They are non-trivial entanglements (links), but they become trivial ( “untangable” ) when one of the components is removed. One example are the Borromean rings . Brunn introduced it in 1892 in a paper in which he proposed a generalization of the Gaussian link number of knots to concatenations as an invariant, and he also published other papers on knot theory. In 1896 he became a librarian at the Technical University of Munich. His last work on knot theory was his lecture at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Zurich in 1897 (About knotted curves). In 1903 he met the mathematician Hermann Minkowski of the same age . From 1905 Brunn was also an honorary professor at the University of Munich. In 1912 he became senior librarian and in 1920 library director. In 1927 he retired.

Private life

In 1900 he married Emma, ​​a daughter of the landowner and writer Friedrich Ney and Anna Veillodter. They had a son. Brunn was also a translator, for example of the Luis de Góngora work Soledades , published in 1934 , and in 1940 published the volume of poetry Survive me, happy hours! . He edited his father's writings and wrote an autobiography in 1913. Brunn published memories of the philosopher Julius Langbehn , his father and the landscape and portrait painter Karl Haider .

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Wilhelm Blaschke obituary for Herrmann Brunn in the annual report of the German Mathematicians Association 50, 1940
  2. ^ Heinrich von Brunn: Commemorative speech held in the public meeting of the Kb Academy of Sciences
  3. ↑ Brunnian link, The knot atlas
  4. ↑ Brunn, about concatenation, meeting reports of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences, Math.-Naturwiss. Class, Volume 22, 1892, pp. 77-99
  5. ↑ see Moritz Epple, The emergence of the knot theory, Vieweg 1999, p. 180ff. Further work by Brunn on this: Topological considerations, Z. f. Mathematics and Physics (Schlömilch), Volume 37, 1892, pp. 106-116, About apparent colons of space curves. A contribution to the Analysis Situs, Annual Report DMV, Volume 3, 1893, pp. 84–85
  6. ^ Brunn, Hermann Karl German biography
  7. ↑ Deutsche Rundschau, Volume 55, 1929, pp. 20–34
personal data
SURNAME Brunn, Hermann
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Brunn, Hermann Karl
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German mathematician
DATE OF BIRTH August 1, 1862
PLACE OF BIRTH Rome
DATE OF DEATH September 20, 1939
Place of death Munich