Maximilian Pinl

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Maximilian "Max" Pinl (born August 17, 1897 in Dux ; † September 16, 1978 in Cologne ) was an Austrian-Czech-German mathematician.

Life

Pinl was the son of a pharmacist in Dux (owner of the hospital pharmacy). He attended the (old-language) kuk state high school in Teplitz-Schönau and was a soldier in the First World War from 1915. In 1916 he was taken prisoner by Russia (partly in West Siberia), from which he fled in early 1918.

Pinl first studied at the Montan University Leoben . After reading the textbook on the general theory of relativity space, time, matter by Hermann Weyl , he switched to studying mathematics and theoretical physics at the University of Vienna (his teachers included Philipp Furtwängler , Hans Hahn , Josef Lense , Kurt Reidemeister , Hans Thirring , Wilhelm Wirtinger ). In 1926 he received his doctorate at Lense ( on ametric manifolds in the Euclidean space of five and more dimensions ).

He then continued his studies in Prague (among others with Georg Pick and Ludwig Berwald ) and at the Humboldt University in Berlin . In Berlin he heard from Albert Einstein , Heinz Hopf , Ludwig Bieberbach , Erhard Schmidt , Issai Schur , Max von Laue , Richard von Mises , John von Neumann , Erwin Schrödinger , Stefan Bergman, among others .

His main occupation was a statistician. Until 1935 he worked for the yearbook on the progress of mathematics . In 1936 he completed his habilitation at the German University of Prague ( quasi-metrics on total isotropic surfaces ) and was a lecturer there from 1938 (after confirmation of the teaching permit by the Czech government) until 1945, although the National Socialists considered him politically suspicious because he stood up for persecuted colleagues and the General theory of relativity defended. After six months in the Gestapo, he was banned from teaching at German universities and worked as a scientist at the Messerschmitt aircraft factory in Augsburg from 1940 to 1943 and then at the Hermann Göring Aviation Research Institute in Braunschweig (particularly on gas dynamics) until 1945 . After the war he was at the University of Cologne , where he completed his habilitation and became an adjunct professor in 1948 . In the same year he received a call to the University of Greifswald, which he had to turn down.

Pinl headed the mathematics faculty at Dacca University in what would later become Bangladesh from 1949 to 1954 before returning to Cologne. In 1962 he retired , but held various visiting professorships in the USA (1962 to 1964 Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta , as well as at the University of Idaho in Moscow ) and from 1964 to 1967 at the invitation of Heinrich Behnke at the University of Münster .

He dealt with partial differential equations , differential geometry and theoretical physics (gas dynamics, general relativity)

He worked as a scientific translator from Czech (for example works by Václav Hlavatý (1894–1969)), but is best known for his series of portraits of mathematicians persecuted by the National Socialists at German universities, which he commissioned by the German mathematicians Association and which were published in the annual reports of the DMV from 1969 to 1975 ( colleagues in a dark time ). The report has been criticized on the one hand because of the selection and because it avoids specifying the specific reasons for the persecution in individual cases, for example in 1970 by Wilhelm Magnus .

He also translated Gheorghe Vrânceanu's lectures on differential geometry from French. 89 scientific publications come from him.

He was married, his daughter is the political scientist Claudia Pinl .

Works

Pinl's portraits of mathematicians persecuted by the National Socialists (annual reports of the DMV), published under the title Colleagues in a Dark Time :

  • Part 1, Annual Report DMV, Volume 71, 1969, pp. 167-228, are dealt with Aachen, Berlin, Bonn, Braunschweig, Breslau, Frankfurt, Bergakademie Freiberg, Freiburg, Gießen, online
  • Part 2, Annual Report DMV, Volume 72, 1971, pp. 165-189, treated is Göttingen, online
  • Part 3, Annual Report DMV, Volume 73, 1972, pp. 153-208, covered is Halle, Hamburg, Jena, Karlsruhe, Kiel, Cologne, Koenigsberg, Leipzig, Marburg, Munich, Münster, Rostock, Tübingen, online
  • Part 4, Annual Report DMV, Volume 75, 1974, pp. 166-208 (with Auguste Dick , deals with Prague and Vienna, also contains his own biography, pp. 180-181), online
  • DMV Annual Report, Volume 77, 1976, pp. 161-164 (with Auguste Dick, supplements: Bernhard Baule , Erwin Schrödinger and correction to Paul Funk ), online
  • Additions to this can also be found in Pinl, L. Furtmüller Mathematicians under Hitler. Publications of the Leo Baeck Institute , Yearbook 18, London 1973, pp. 129-182.

Colleagues in the dark

The series of articles deals in detail (with the respective last university places of activity before emigration, murder or other consequences of persecution):

The essays contain short biographies of the respective mathematicians and lists of publications.

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. From this published on Existential Theory and Classification of Totally Isotropic Areas. In: Composition Mathematica. 5, 1937, pp. 208-238.
  2. To a diet lecturer . In 1957 he became an associate professor
  3. ^ Hlavaty: Differential geometry of curves and surfaces and tensor calculus. Groningen / Batavia 1939, Hlavaty: Differential line geometry. Groningen 1945.
  4. a b List of those biographed there at the DMV
  5. ^ Letter to the editors of the DMV annual report, quoted in Reinhard Siegmund-Schultze Mathematicians fleeing from Nazi Germany. Princeton University Press, 2009, p. 336.
  6. Mostly persecuted by the National Socialists, except at Gentzen. The persecution often took place for racist reasons (Jewish origin), sometimes for political reasons. The degree of persecution varies in severity (in the case of Sommerfeld it consists of attacks by representatives of German Physics ) and some escaped her through early emigration. In addition to mathematicians, some theoretical physicists are also listed.