Max Steck

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Max Steck (born December 1, 1907 in Basel , † September 12, 1971 in Prien am Chiemsee ) was a German-Swiss mathematician and mathematician who is primarily known today for the bibliographical indexing of the writings of Johann Heinrich Lambert .

Life

Steck began his studies in 1927 at the University of Basel . In July 1932 he passed the Rigorosum in the subjects of mathematics, physics and philosophy at the Ruprecht-Karls-Universität Heidelberg with the grade very good and in the following November he did his doctorate under Heinrich Liebmann on the Zeuthen postulate and the principle of interchanging to justify the projective Geometry with the grade very good. Steck completed his habilitation in 1938. From 1941 to 1944, he had a teaching position in geometry at the Ludwig Maximilians University in Munich . Max Steck was a student and good friend of the Swiss mathematician Andreas Speiser .

During the National Socialist era, Steck was a representative of so-called German mathematics and also published several articles on geometry in the journal of the same name.

In 1939, shortly after Heinrich Liebmann died, Steck submitted an essay for publication in the Mathematische Annalen , which was dedicated to his doctoral supervisor Liebmann, who was dismissed in 1935 because of his partially Jewish descent. Erich Hecke , who had become aware of Steck through his habilitation, then wrote to Heinrich Behnke that one had to point out the difficulties that Steck could face with such a dedication. Steck's essay finally appeared in Mathematische Annalen 117 without the dedication. In other writings, however, Steck expressed himself extremely anti-Semitic - e.g. For example, he describes Moritz Geiger's approach “in analogy to the contemporary fashions in art ” as “degenerate mathematics”.

Max Steck, who dealt with mathematical-historical and philosophical questions, belonged to the ideological circle around Hugo Dingler and to the "Gestaltkreis" around Viktor von Weizsäcker , Wilhelm Troll , Karl Lothar Wolf and Wilhelm Pinder , who owned the magazine "Die Gestalt - Abhandlungen" a general Morphologie ”and organized colloquia at the Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg in the 1940s .

Within German mathematics, Max Steck developed his own largely isolated position, in which he sharply attacked formalism (from e.g. Hilbert ) on the one hand (for which he cited e.g. Gödel's incompleteness theorem and Gentzen's review of it), but on the other hand also from Logicism (from e.g. Heinrich Scholz ) and from intuitionism (from e.g. Ludwig Bieberbach ). He accused the formalism, to which he granted a “one-time achievement”, a “restriction to the calculative” and removal of epistemological sense and meaning, and demanded an addition to the “shape”, whereby the “shapes” are there “where the conceptual is realized ”as a“ model ”. Max Steck himself called his mathematical- philosophical approach " idealistic " and spoke of an approach in the spirit of Immanuel Kant and German idealism . In addition, he pleaded for the addition of an art theoretical terminology of z. B. Heinrich Wölfflin . In the work of the same name, the elucidation of the relationship between content and formalism is described as the philosophical “main problem” of mathematics. According to Steck, a pure formalism has an infinite number of possible realizations and only becomes “a specifically mathematical object and a genuine mathematical statement” through a linguistic or graphic interpretation.

In 1952, Steck became a professor at the State Academy for Applied Technology in Nuremberg , which today belongs to the Georg-Simon-Ohm University of Nuremberg . In 1957 he became a professor at the Academy for Structural Engineering in Munich .

Quotes

“Both, mathematics and art, encompass the figure that exists in mathematics in the purely mental structure belonging to the world of thought, in art in the finished work of art belonging to the world of reality. ... Out of the foundations of the creative thought and under the urge to order it, mathematics and art form a structure of the most meaningful essence. In mathematics, truth is to be grasped; in art it is beauty that the artist seeks to capture. The truth is beautiful in mathematics; the beautiful is true in art . ... Here, out of that vivid view of the idea (it has often been called “intuition”), the artistic idea for sculpture, painting, ornament, building, designed language, fugue or symphony is formed organically , to the song or to the choral work. There, under the compulsion of a uniform form of seeing mathematics, under the inventive power of thinking in consistent, unambiguous terminology, the mathematical idea is formed into a geometric structure and the knowledge of its properties, the formula that establishes numerical relationships, the mathematical theorem par excellence. "

- Max Steck in 1941: Foreword to the 1st edition

“ These things (the mathematical objects) are only there in and with us and our thinking and experiencing faculties in their consistent being thought (as ideas ) . - There are thought things (of a mathematical kind) by virtue of my own being as a living, experiencing, thinking soul, as a material, fleshly body that reacts to sensual impressions. ... Mathematical things are only created creatively through consistent thinking; after this act of thought (and this experience creation) they have his and only through this subject dependent, releasing thinking (and creative experience) they exist. "

- Max Steck (The main problem in mathematics)

Awards and honors

Works (author, editor)

  • 1932 - The Zeuthen postulate and the principle of interchangeability to justify projective geometry ; Dissertation, Heidelberg University
  • 1941 - The perception of space as a psychological process , Leipzig, together with Gustav Johannes von Allesch
  • 1941 - On the essence of mathematics and mathematical knowledge in Kepler , Leipzig
  • 1942 - Mathematics as Concept and Shape , Halle an der Saale
  • 1942 - The main problem of mathematics , Berlin, Dr. Georg Lüttke Publishing House
  • 1943 - Mathematical Idealism , In: Kant Studies , January 1943
  • 1943 - Mathematics and Art , Berlin, Dr. Georg Lüttke Publishing House
  • 1943 - Johann Heinrich Lambert, writings on perspective. Edited and introduced by Max Steck , Berlin
  • 1945 - Proclus Diadochus 410-485: Commentary on the first book of Euclid's "Elements" , trans. by Leander Schönberger (1882–1943), edited by Max Steck. Halle on the Saale; in collaboration with Emil Abderhalden
  • 1946 - Basic areas of mathematics , Heidelberg (Winters study guide. Group 2: Natural science and mathematics)
  • 1948 - Dürer's design theory of mathematics and the fine arts , Halle an der Saale
  • 1957 - Dürer. A picture biography , together with Wilhelm Rüdiger
  • 1961 - Albrecht Dürer . Writings, diaries, letters , Stuttgart
  • 1969 - Albrecht Dürer as an art theorist. The intellectual and problem-historical position of his theory of proportion in the art space of the Renaissance , Zurich
  • 1969 - Four books of human proportions, Nuremberg 1528 (facsimile of the Dürer work edited by Max Steck, 2 volumes)
  • 1981 - Bibliographia Euclideana. The spiritual lines of tradition in the editions of the "Elements" of Euclid around 365-300. Manuscripts, incunabula, early prints from the 16th century. Critical editions of the 17th – 20th centuries Century. Editions of the Opera Minora (16th – 20th centuries). (edited posthumously by Menso Folkerts )

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Euclid's geometry and its mathematical-theoretical foundation in the Neo-Platonic philosophy of Proklos , Markus Schmitz, Königshausen and Neumann, 1997, ISBN 9783826012686 , p. 69.
  2. ^ Eckart Menzler-Trott : Logic's Lost Genius: The Life of Gerhard Gentzen . American Mathematical Society, 2007, ISBN 9780821835500 , p. 210.
  3. ^ Sanford L. Segal: Mathematicians under the Nazis. Princeton University Press, Princeton 2003, ISBN 0-691-00451-X , p. 244 ff.
  4. ↑ In: The main problem of mathematics , year 1943, p. 191.
  5. ↑ In: The main problem of mathematics , year 1943, p. 150.
  6. ^ Mathematics as Concept and Shape , 1942, pp. 13, 29, 30
  7. ^ The main problem of mathematics , year 1943, pp. XII, XIX, 3.
  8. ^ Mathematics as Concept and Shape , 1942, pp. 12ff.
  9. ↑ In: The main problem of mathematics , year 1943, p. IXf.
  10. ↑ In: Das Hauptproblem der Mathematik , year 1943, p. 104. (here in bold type instead of blocking type; brackets are included in the original)
  11. ↑ Logic's Lost Genius: The Life of Gerhard Gentzen , Eckart Menzler-Trott, American Mathematical Society, 2007, ISBN 9780821835500 , p. 210.
  12. ^ Member entry of Max Steck at the German Academy of Natural Scientists Leopoldina , accessed on June 22, 2016.
personal data
SURNAME Steck, Max
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German-Swiss mathematician and mathematician historian
DATE OF BIRTH December 1, 1907
PLACE OF BIRTH Basel
DATE OF DEATH September 12, 1971
Place of death Prien am Chiemsee