Paul Kuhn (mathematician)

Paul Kuhn , also Pavel Kuhn , (born May 16, 1901 in Prague , † 1984 ) was a Czech mathematician.

Kuhn studied mathematics and physics at the German University in Prague and received his doctorate under Georg Pick in 1926 (on contact transformations). He worked as an actuary, intended to do his habilitation in Prague (encouraged by Ludwig Berwald ), but had to flee from the National Socialists and went to Norway at the invitation of Viggo Brun . He was an assistant in Trondheim. After the German occupation, he fled to Sweden with Ernst Jacobsthal in January 1943 . His mother and both sisters died in the Holocaust. In Sweden he conducted research in Uppsala, where he met his wife Marta again in 1945. After the war he stayed in Sweden. Initially he worked as an archivist and later as an actuary through Harald Cramér . In 1972 he gave up to devote his final years to mathematical research.

Although he initially dealt with differential geometry, he was already interested in number theory after participating in a seminar by Christian Ehrenfried in 1921, which intensified under the influence of Viggo Brun. Among other things, he improved the remainder of the elementary proof of the prime number theorem and developed a weighted sieving method .

He was a corresponding member of the Norwegian Academy in Trondheim since 1960.

literature

• Maximilian Pinl Colleagues in a Dark Time , Annual Report DMV, 75, 1973, 174–175
• K. Lanner, Paul Kuhn död, UNT 1984

References and comments

1. ↑ Short biography in Jaak Peetre, Rooney Magnusson, Correspondence of Marcel Riesz with Swedes 1, 2009, p. 292
2. ↑ Reinhard Siegmund-Schultze, Mathematicians fleeing from Nazi-Germany, p. 127, depicting the flight of Kuhn and Jacobsthal.
3. ↑ Mathematica Scandinavica 3, 1955, pp. 75-89