Johannes Nitsche
Johannes Carl Christian Nitsche (born January 22, 1925 in Olbernhau , Saxony ; † August 9, 2006 ) was a German-American mathematician who dealt with the calculus of variations and minimal surfaces , differential geometry and partial differential equations.
Nitsche studied from 1945 with Franz Rellich at the University of Göttingen (diploma 1950) and received his doctorate in 1951 with Ernst Hölder at the University of Leipzig (on systems of canonical differential equations and the associated singular eigenvalue problem). Then he was at the Max Planck Institute, from 1952 assistant at the TU Berlin, where he completed his habilitation in 1955 and had a teaching position. 1955/56 he was a Fulbright Fellow at Stanford University and from 1956 Associate Professor at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis , where he became professor in 1960 and retired in 2000. From 1971 to 1978 he was head of the mathematics faculty there.
He dealt with minimal surfaces, for which he proved a principle of uniqueness and about which he wrote a standard work. He also gave a simplified proof of Sergei Bernstein's theorem about minimal surfaces.
In 1975 he received the Lester Ford Prize of the Mathematical Association of America and the Alexander von Humboldt Prize. In 1962 he gave a lecture at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Stockholm ( The extension of minimal surfaces intersected in starshaped curves by parallel planes ).
Nitsche was married with a daughter and two sons. He was the brother of Joachim Nitsche , with whom he also worked.
Fonts
- Lectures on minimal surfaces, Springer 1975, Basic Teachings of Mathematical Sciences (English first volume at Cambridge University Press 1999, two more volumes were planned, but remained unfinished)
- Plateau's Problems and their modern Ramifications , American Mathematical Monthly, Volume 81, 1974, p. 945 (received the Lester Randolph Ford Award )
Web links
- Literature by and about Johannes Nitsche in the catalog of the German National Library
- Universitätsnachrichten (Newsletter of the School of Mathematics) on the occasion of his retirement in 2001
- Obituary 2007 at the University of Minnesota, PDF file (772 kB)
References
- ^ Date of birth according to Michael Toeppel (Ed.), General Directory of Members of the German Mathematicians Association 1890-1990, Munich 1991
- ↑ Nitsche "A new uniqueness theorem for minimal surfaces", Archive for Rational Mechanics and Analysis, Vol. 52, 1973, p 319
- ^ Nitsche "An elementary proof of Bernstein's Theorem on Minimal Surfaces", Annals of Mathematics, Vol. 66, 1957, pp. 543-544
- ↑ for Nitsche Plateau's problems and their modern ramifications , American Mathematical Monthly, Vol. 81, 1974, pp. 945-968
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Nitsche, Johannes |
| ALTERNATIVE NAMES | Nitsche, Johannes CC; Nitsche, Johannes Carl Christian |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | American mathematician and university professor |
| DATE OF BIRTH | January 22, 1925 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Olbernhau |
| DATE OF DEATH | August 9, 2006 |