Kurt-Reinhard Biermann

The grave of Kurt-Reinhard Biermann and his wife Elisabeth, born Appuhn, in the Evangelical Cemetery in Buch in Berlin.

Kurt-Reinhard Biermann , often Kurt-R. Biermann quoted, (born December 5, 1919 in Bernburg (Saale) ; † May 24, 2002 in Berlin ) was a German science historian and expert on the life and work of Alexander von Humboldt .

Life

Biermann came from a family of higher officials. His father was an administrative lawyer and senior public prosecutor, his mother, née Wallmüller, came from a family of doctors and officers. He attended high school in Dessau . In 1937 he passed the Abitur at the Lessing-Gymnasium in Berlin and then did his Reich labor service and in 1938 his military service with the 48th Infantry Regiment in Neustrelitz . Before being drafted into the Wehrmacht , he began studying in Berlin-Charlottenburg . Since the beginning of the Second World War he was in action and since the end of the French campaign an active officer of the tank weapon . From 1940 to 1943 he studied mechanical engineering by distance learning at the Engineer-Officer Academy in Stuttgart and the TH Dresden . He was taken prisoner by the Soviets on the Eastern Front , from which he returned in 1949.

In 1950 he found a job in the administration of the German Academy of Sciences (DAdW). From 1952 he worked first as an assistant, then as an assistant and doctoral student at the Academy of Sciences of the GDR , which is currently being established, and at the same time took up a distance learning course at the TH Dresden in technical economics. From the beginning of 1956 he worked as an employee of Hans Ertel on the “Alexander von Humboldt Commission” of the Academy. In 1956 he was also the secretary of the commission for the preparation of the Euler anniversary. He passed his diploma examination in 1957 as an external student at the Humboldt University in Berlin . In 1964 he received his doctorate with distinction in the history of mathematics from Humboldt University . He took the mathematical exams in front of Heinrich Grell and the math historian Joseph Ehrenfried Hofmann from Tübingen, who was invited as a corresponding member of the academy because there was no math historian in Berlin. The faculty refrained from writing a dissertation and recognized Biermann's publications as such as part of his work at the academy.

In 1968 he completed his habilitation with a thesis on "Mathematics and its lecturers at the Berlin University 1810–1920" at Hofmann. The following year, the head of the "Alexander von Humboldt Research Center" Fritz G. Lange retired and Biermann was his successor. In 1972 he was appointed professor of the history of science at the academy.

Biermann retired in 1984 and died in Berlin in 2002. He was married to the physician Elisabeth Biermann and had two sons. The younger died of a heart attack in 1987 at the age of 31, which hit Biermann and his wife hard, as his biographer Hanno Beck reported.

plant

Biermann's first significant development were the editing principles of the "Contributions to Alexander von Humboldt Research". In 1959 he wrote the article “On the support of German mathematicians by Alexander von Humboldt” for the “Commemorative publication on the 100th anniversary of Alexander von Humboldt's death”. In the history of mathematics, he began with publications on the development of combinatorics , iteration, and probability . From there he went on to publications on the relationship between Humboldt and mathematics and increasingly shifted his focus to Humboldt and his diverse scientific research.

In 1980, a popular short biography of Humboldt appeared, which by 1990 had four editions. In 1988 he submitted an adaptation of his dissertation from 1964 in which he continued the history of "Mathematics and its lecturers at the Berlin University" until 1933. A collection of his essays on Humboldt was published in 1989 under the title Miscellanea Humboldtiana . In 1990 he prepared the life and work of Carl Friedrich Gauß after his conversations and letters.

Biermann had been a member of the German Academy of Sciences Leopoldina in Halle since 1972 and an honorary member of the Gauss Society in Göttingen. He was Vice President of the Académie internationale d'histoire des sciences in Paris.

literature

• Gottwald, Ilgauds, Schlote: Lexicon of important mathematicians. 1990.
• Joseph Dauben (Ed.): Mathematical Perspectives. Essays on Mathematics and Its Historical Development. (Festschrift for the 80th birthday of Kurt-Reinhard Biermann), New York, London, Toronto, Sydney, San Francisco 1981, with bibliography of Biermann's writings, supplemented in Siegmund-Schultze: Kurt-R. Biermann on his 70th birthday . Historia Nathematica, Vol. 16, 1989, pp. 309-315.
• Hanno Beck : Memories of Kurt-R . Biermann . In: Beck, Reinhard Siegmund-Schultze, Christian Suckow, Menso Folkerts: Nature, Mathematics and History: Contributions to Alexander von Humboldt Research and Mathematical Historiography. Acta Historica Leopoldina, Vol. 27, 1997.
• Annette Vogt:  Biermann, Kurt-Reinhard . In: Who was who in the GDR? 5th edition. Volume 1. Ch. Links, Berlin 2010, ISBN 978-3-86153-561-4 .
• Biermann, Kurt-Reinhard , in: Friedhelm Golücke : Author's lexicon for student and university history. SH-Verlag, Cologne 2004, ISBN 3-89498-130-X . Pp. 39-40.

Web links

• Literature by and about Kurt-Reinhard Biermann in the catalog of the German National Library
• Author profile in the database zbMATH

Individual evidence

1. ^ Kurt-Reinhard Biermann: The mathematics and its lecturers at the Berlin University 1810-1933 - stations on the way of a mathematical center of world renown . Berlin, Akademie-Verlag, ISBN 3-05-500402-7
2. ↑ Kurt-R. Biermann, Ingo Schwarz: Why did Alexander von Humboldt describe himself as THE OLD ONE FROM THE MOUNTAIN (Vecchio della Montagna)? . In: Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. Notifications . AvH-Magazin No. 60, December 1992, pp. 71-73. Reprint at Humboldt im Netz , University of Potsdam and Alexander von Humboldt Research Center.