Karl Menninger (mathematician)
Karl Menninger (born October 6, 1898 in Frankfurt am Main ; † October 2, 1963 in Heppenheim ) was a German math historian and author of mathematical non-fiction books.
Life
Karl Menninger was the son of a railway clerk and went to secondary school in Darmstadt. From 1917 he studied mathematics, physics, philosophy and geography in Heidelberg, Darmstadt ( TH Darmstadt ), Munich and Frankfurt am Main, where he received his doctorate in 1921 under Ludwig Bieberbach ( The problem of mathematics with Bernard Bolzano ). After his teaching examination, he was a grammar school teacher for mathematics, physics and art in Heppenheim an der Bergstrasse from 1923 until his death in 1963. From 1936 he was a teacher and from 1955 a senior teacher. From the 1920s he gave radio lectures on mathematics and began publishing popular science books on mathematics in 1931. During the Second World War he taught as a visiting lecturer at the University of Giessen.
Menninger is best known for his book Number Word and Number - A Cultural History of Numbers from 1934, which has been translated into many foreign languages and deals with the history of mathematical notation around the world. Until shortly before his death, he worked on a book on the history of perspective .
In 1957 he received the Liebig Medal from the University of Giessen .
Fonts
- Arithmetic tricks: Funny and advantageous arithmetic - a teaching and manual for daily arithmetic , 12th edition, Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht 1983 (first 1931)
- Ali Baba and the 39 Camels , 11th edition, Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht 1982 (first 1940)
- Number word and number - a cultural history of number , Breslau, Hirt 1934, 2nd, revised and expanded edition, Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht 1957/58 in two volumes, 3rd edition 1979 (English translation 1969 Number Words and Number Symbols , Cambridge, Mass. , MIT Press)
- Mathematics and Art , Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht 1959
- Mathematics in your world - on their mind and their way of thinking , Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht 1958
- Between space and number-mathematical forays , Ullstein 1960
- Kugelbauch , Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht 1961 (mathematical poems, drawings by W. Menninger)
literature
- Joseph W. Dauben , Christoph J. Scriba (Ed.): Writing the history of mathematics. Its historical development . Birkhäuser, Basel et al. 2002, ISBN 3-7643-6167-0 , ( Science networks 27).
- Michael Toepell: Menninger, Karl. In: New German Biography (NDB). Volume 17, Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 1994, ISBN 3-428-00198-2 , p. 85 ( digitized version ).
Web links
- Literature by and about Karl Menninger in the catalog of the German National Library
Remarks
- ↑ with gaps in relation to Africa, treated in the book by Claudia Zavlasky Africa Counts 1973. See also Georges Ifrah Universal History of Numbers , first French 1981, Campus Verlag 1993
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Menninger, Karl |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | German mathematician |
| DATE OF BIRTH | October 6, 1898 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Frankfurt am Main |
| DATE OF DEATH | 2nd October 1963 |
| Place of death | Heppenheim |