Otto Blumenthal (mathematician)

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Ludwig Otto Blumenthal (born July 20, 1876 in Frankfurt am Main ; † November 13, 1944 in the Theresienstadt ghetto ) was a German mathematician.

Life

He grew up in Frankfurt and was a student at the Goethe Gymnasium. At the age of 18, influenced by a friend, he converted from Judaism to the Evangelical faith.

After studying mathematics and natural sciences in Göttingen , where he attended lectures by Sommerfeld , Schoenflies , Hilbert and Klein , and in Munich from 1894 to 1898, Blumenthal was David Hilbert's first doctoral student . The title of his dissertation was On the development of an arbitrary function according to the denominators of a Stieltjes continued fraction . From 1899 to 1900 he studied with Émile Borel and Camille Jordan in Paris. In 1901 , Blumenthal completed his habilitation in Göttingen on the subject of module functions of several variables .

Until 1905 he was a private lecturer in Göttingen and for a short time he was a substitute professor at the University of Marburg . In October 1905, Blumenthal was appointed to a chair at RWTH Aachen University.

His main mathematical interest was initially in the application of the theory of complex functions in number theory. The aim of his investigations into modular forms in several variables was to find functions with which algebraic number fields could be constructed ( Kronecker's youth dream , the twelfth of Hilbert's problems ). The Hilbert-Blumenthal surfaces and the Hilbert-Blumenthal modular shapes are named after him. Blumenthal was a close collaborator of Hilbert and also wrote his biography in Hilbert's collected works. Blumenthal also dealt with the theory of whole functions , especially those of infinite order, and published a book on this in 1910 (in French). He also wrote several articles on applied mathematics . His contributions to spherical functions can be found e.g. B. Application in communications engineering . He also studied stresses in airplane wings, vibration of membranes, etc.

From 1906 to 1938 he was the managing editor of the Mathematische Annalen . In 1924 he was chairman of the German Mathematicians Association (DMV) and from 1925 to 1933 he published the DMV's annual report. Blumenthal spoke eight languages ​​and had many international contacts, including with Soviet mathematicians. In 1923 Blumenthal was elected a member of the Leopoldina Academic Academy .

Memorial plaque in the main building of the RWTH Aachen .

In the spring of 1933, denunciation measures by the student body began at RWTH Aachen University . The ASTA ( General Student Committee ) and the student leaders sent the denunciation committee specially set up for this purpose, consisting of Hermann Bonin , Hubert Hoff , Felix Rötscher , Adolf Wallichs , and Robert Hans Wentzel, about which of the lecturers and professors were not of Aryan descent or were supposed to be actually had an undesirable political attitude. According to the law for the restoration of the civil service, Blumenthal was supposed to be together with the other non-Aryan professors Arthur Guttmann , Walter Maximilian Fuchs , Ludwig Hopf , Theodore von Kármán , Paul Ernst due to his Jewish origin and his membership in unpopular organizations such as the German League for Human Rights Levy , Karl Walter Mautner , Alfred Meusel , Leopold Karl Pick , Rudolf Ruer , Hermann Salmang and Ludwig Strauss had their teaching license withdrawn from September 1933. A request from his incumbent rector Paul Röntgen to the Reich Commissioner in the Ministry of Education, Bernhard Rust , to be allowed to keep him, did not lead to a positive result. Since Blumenthal's grandparents were of Jewish faith, he was regarded by the Nazis as a "full Jew" despite his conversion to Protestantism due to the Nuremberg Laws . He was given leave of absence from his position in May 1933 and then dismissed for political reasons on September 22, 1933. Shortly afterwards, his salaries were discontinued. His dismissal was allegedly not for "racial" reasons, but because of his membership in pacifist associations.

He gave numerous lectures at home and abroad, but could not find a permanent position. In 1938 he was finally banned from working in Germany and he also had to give up his more than 30 years of work as managing editor of the "Mathematische Annalen". In July 1939 he emigrated to the Netherlands with his wife Mali and lived in Utrecht . Here they were friends with a number of other German-Jewish emigrants, including the historian Hedwig Hintze . After the couple was spared deportation in August 1942 through the intervention of a pastor , they were both deported first to the Herzogenbusch concentration camp and then to the Westerbork transit camp in April 1943 . His wife died in Westerbork in May 1943, he came to the Theresienstadt ghetto in January 1944 and died there of pneumonia in November. On one occasion he had already been pushed onto a train to Auschwitz, but was then taken off the train by the Nazis.

Blumenthal, whom Constance Reid described in her Hilbert biography as open-minded, cheerful and sociable, was known throughout her life as Hilbert's oldest student and he was very close to Hilbert. He wrote his biography for the collected works of Hilbert (an important source on Hilbert) and for an edition of the natural sciences . In 1938 he attended the birthday party of Hilbert, who reacted incredulously and indignantly to the news of Blumenthal's dismissal (he said his former students wanted to play a bad joke on him). For the students present this was a sign of the increasing alienation and isolation of old Hilbert. In Holland, Blumenthal dedicated a publication to Hilbert on his 80th birthday, but when he was arrested, Hilbert had been dead for several months.

Honors

Memorial stone in Limburger Strasse
  • In front of his last residence at Limburger Strasse 22 in Aachen, a memorial plaque left in the ground for the project Paths against Oblivion reminds of the persecution of Blumenthal by the National Socialists. It bears the inscription:

“Otto Blumenthal lived in this house from 1933 until his emigration in 1939. From 1905 he worked as a professor of mathematics at RWTH Aachen. Despite his commitment to the college, he was dismissed in 1933 for racial and political reasons. In 1938, a work ban ended his other scientific activities. He emigrated to the Netherlands in 1939, was interned there after the German occupation in 1940 and died in the Theresienstadt concentration camp in 1944. "

  • In Aachen and Herzogenrath ( Aachen city region ) streets are named after him.
  • In the main building of the RWTH Aachen , a plaque commemorates the fate of Otto Blumenthal
  • A memorial stele of the Leopoldina in memory of nine members of the Academy who were murdered in the concentration camps of the National Socialists or died of the inhuman and cruel conditions of the camp imprisonment also reminds of Otto Blumenthal

literature

  • Paul Butzer, Lutz Volkmann: Otto Blumenthal (1876–1944) in retrospect. In: Journal of Approximation Theory. 138, 2006, pp. 1-36.
  • Volkmar Felsch: Otto Blumenthal's diaries. A math professor from Aachen suffers the Nazi dictatorship in Germany, the Netherlands and Theresienstadt. Edited by Erhard Roy Wiehn, Hartung-Gorre Verlag, Konstanz 2011, ISBN 978-3-86628-384-8 .
  • Ernst Milkutat:  Blumenthal, Ludwig Otto von. In: New German Biography (NDB). Volume 2, Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 1955, ISBN 3-428-00183-4 , p. 332 f. ( Digitized version ).
  • David. E. Rowe: Otto Blumenthal: Selected letters and writings I, 1897-1918 . Springer Spectrum, Berlin 2018, ISBN 978-3-662-56724-1 .
  • David. E. Rowe and Volkmar Felsch: Otto Blumenthal: Selected letters and writings II, 1919-1944 . Springer Spectrum, Berlin 2019, ISBN 978-3-662-58355-5 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ The information on the exact date of death is contradictory. The date of November 12, 1944, which is widely used in literature, comes from a report that a fellow prisoner from Theresienstadt wrote down for the Blumenthal family at the end of 1945. A simultaneous report by another inmate, which has not been taken into account so far, confirms November 13th as the date of death specified in the original Theresienstadt documents. See Felsch's book under “Literature”, pp. 483–488. (The date of death of November 18th given in the Dutch Joods Monument is likely to go back to an incorrectly read 13. However, it is no longer changed there, because it was so determined by the Dutch Ministry of Justice after the war.)
  2. ↑ From Volume 101, 1929, only Hilbert, Blumenthal and Erich Hecke were named as editors
  3. ^ Reid, Hilbert and Courant, Springer 1986, p. 215
  4. ↑ Constance Reid, Hilbert-Courant, Springer 1986, p. 97. Reid's book about Hilbert is dedicated to Blumenthal
  5. ^ Hilbert, Collected Works, Volume 3, 1935
  6. ^ Reid, Courant-Hilbert, Springer 1986, pp. 210f
  7. ↑ Leopoldina erects a stele in memory of Nazi victims. (2009).
personal data
SURNAME Blumenthal, Otto
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Blumenthal, Ludwig Otto von (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German mathematician
DATE OF BIRTH July 20, 1876
PLACE OF BIRTH Frankfurt am Main
DATE OF DEATH November 13, 1944
Place of death Theresienstadt ghetto