Leopold Vietoris

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Leopold Vietoris on his 110th birthday

Leopold Vietoris (born June 4, 1891 in Bad Radkersburg , Styria , † April 9, 2002 in Innsbruck ) was an Austrian mathematician and supercentenarian - he died at the age of 110 years and 10 months. He and his wife Maria Josefa Vincentia Vietoris, b. Riccabona von Reichenfels (* July 18, 1901, † March 24, 2002) were among the oldest married couples in the world.

Life

Leopold Vietoris was the son of the railway engineer and later senior building officer of the city of Vienna Hugo Vietoris and his wife Anna, née Diller. After graduating from the well-known Stiftsgymnasium Melk , he studied from the academic year 1910/11 at the Technical University of Vienna and from 1911 at the University of Vienna mathematics . During the First World War he served as an Austrian soldier on the Italian front, where he received several awards and was promoted to first lieutenant in the reserve. While recovering from an injury in 1916, he wrote his first mathematical publication, his dissertation on “steady quantities ” he wrote in 1918/19, partly in Italian captivity.

After a brief activity as a teacher (1919/20), he was a university assistant at the Graz University of Technology from 1920 to 1922 , and at the Mathematical Institute at the University of Vienna from 1922 to 1927 . In 1923 he completed his habilitation with a study on set theory , and in 1925/1926 he spent three semesters at the University of Amsterdam with LEJ Brouwer as part of a Rockefeller scholarship . In 1927 he became an associate professor in Innsbruck, in 1928 a full professor at the Vienna University of Technology, and in 1930 finally a full professor at the University of Innsbruck , where he - interrupted by being a first lieutenant in the German armed forces , which was quickly terminated by an injury in the first days of the war - until remained active on his retirement in 1961. In 1935 he turned down an offer to the University of Vienna.

Vietoris received numerous awards for his scientific achievements: 1935 corresponding and from 1960 full member of the Austrian Academy of Sciences , honorary doctorates from the Technical University of Vienna (1984) and the University of Innsbruck (1994), Austrian Cross of Honor for Science and Art (1970), Grand Golden Decoration of Honor for Services to the Republic of Austria (1981), Gold Medal of the Austrian Mathematical Society (1981), Cross of Merit of the City of Innsbruck (1982). Vietoris was an honorary member of the Austrian Mathematical Society (since 1965) and the German Mathematicians Association (since 1990).

From 1928 to 1935 Vietoris was married to Klara von Riccabona, after her death in childbed he married her sister Maria in 1936, with whom he was married for 66 years.

In public, Leopold Vietoris became famous primarily because of his old age; he was the oldest person in Austria until his death. He is also considered the oldest man in the history of Austria. Even in old age he was still scientifically active; he published his last work at the age of 103. He himself attributed his old age to his sporting activities, up to the age of 95 he regularly took part in academic skiing championships , he gave up mountaineering - forced by a fracture of the femur - at the age of 101. Vietoris died almost two months before his 111th birthday. His wife had died sixteen days earlier at the age of 100.

Vietoris wrote numerous articles for the Wiener Sprachblätter .

The asteroid (6966) Vietoris was named after him on June 10, 1998.

research results

His main field of research was topology , for which he provided many important research results, the best known of which is probably the Mayer-Vietoris sequence (also named after Walther Mayer ) of algebraic topology . Further findings named after him are the theorem of Vietoris companions , the Vietoris topology and the Vietoris homology . Vietoris also made important contributions to probability theory and the area of inequalities . Inspired by his private inclinations to mountaineering and skiing , Vietoris also dealt with questions of the "geometry of mountaineering", "skiing in the light of strength theory" and the mathematical foundations of orientation in the mountains - work that he himself particularly valued.

Literary processing

The figure of the mathematician Carl Jacob Candoris in Michael Köhlmeier's novel “Abendland” is partly inspired by Vietoris, or, as the author puts it, a “little homage” to him.

Awards

Fonts (selection)

  • About the higher coherence of compact spaces and a class of coherent images. Math. Ann. 97 (1927), no. 1, 454-472.
  • About the homology groups of the union of two complexes. Monthly Math. Phys. 37 (1930), no. 1, 159-162.

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Magistrate of the provincial capital Innsbruck: Innsbruck informs , service supplement
  2. ^ Obituary for Leopold Vietoris of the University of Innsbruck
  3. ↑ Vietoris on the homology groups of the union of two complexes , monthly books for mathematics, Volume 37, 1930, pp. 159–162
  4. ↑ Köhlmeier's book "Abendland" nominated for the German Book Prize ( Memento from October 1, 2007 in the Internet Archive ). August 30, 2007
  5. ↑ TU Wien: Honorary doctorates ( memento of the original from February 21, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. . Retrieved March 26, 2015. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.tuwien.ac.at
personal data
SURNAME Vietoris, Leopold
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Austrian mathematician
DATE OF BIRTH June 4, 1891
PLACE OF BIRTH Bad Radkersburg
DATE OF DEATH April 9, 2002
Place of death innsbruck