Peter Scherk

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Peter Scherk (born September 2, 1910 in Berlin ; † June 6, 1985 ) was a German-born Canadian mathematician who dealt with geometry and number theory.

Life

Scherk studied under Hermann Weyl at the Georg-August-Universität Göttingen (as well as in Berlin). In Göttingen he was Edmund Landau's assistant and published a paper on Goldbach's conjecture in 1936 with Landau and Hans Heilbronn . He received his doctorate in 1935 under Gustav Herglotz (and Werner Fenchel ) ( on real closed space curves of the fourth order ). He first went to Berlin with Landau, after he had no more opportunities to work at the university in Göttingen. As a Jew, he fled from the National Socialists to Prague, where he worked as a private tutor, but was also a visiting scholar at the German University, and in February 1939 to the USA, where he initially lived in New York with an uncle. He was supported there by Weyl, who gave him a temporary position at Yale University in 1940. 1941 to 1943 he was an assistant at Indiana University . In 1943 he became an instructor at the University of Saskatchewan in Canada. In 1955 he became a professor there and stayed there until 1959, during which time he was also visiting professor at the University of Pennsylvania . In 1959 he became a professor at the University of Toronto , where he retired in 1976, but remained active in mathematics.

He dealt mainly with differential geometry, but also with number theory, algebra and the theory of convex bodies.

In 1952 he became a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada . He was editor of the Canadian Journal of Mathematics and founding editor of the Canadian Mathematical Bulletin.

The mathematician Heinrich Ferdinand Scherk was a great uncle. His son John Scherk is a math professor at the University of Toronto at Scarborough.

literature

  • Maximilian Pinl Colleagues in a Dark Time , DMV Annual Report, Volume 71, 1971, p. 183

Fonts

  • with Rolf Lingenberg Rudiments of plane affine geometry , University of Toronto Press 1975
  • Topics in the theory of elliptic functions , Queen's University, Kingston, Ontario, 1967

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Landau, Heilbronn, Scherk: All large whole numbers can be represented as the sum of a maximum of 71 prime numbers , Casopis pest. Mat. Fys., Volume 65, 1936, pp. 117-141, reprinted in the collected works of Landau (Volume 9) and Heilbronn.
  2. ^ Mathematics Genealogy Project
  3. ↑ Reinhard Siegmund-Schultze Mathematicians fleeing from Nazi Germany , 2009, p. 107
personal data
SURNAME Scherk, Peter
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German-Canadian mathematician
DATE OF BIRTH September 2, 1910
PLACE OF BIRTH Berlin
DATE OF DEATH June 6, 1985