Rudolf Zurmühl

Rudolf Zurmühl (born September 14, 1904 in Soest ; † October 27, 1966 in Berlin ) was a German mathematician .

Rudolf Zurmühl was the son of a businessman and, after graduating from the Archigymnasium in Soest in 1924, studied mechanical engineering in Hanover and from 1929 in Darmstadt (interrupted by internships of several months, including at MAN ), where he received his diploma in mechanical engineering with distinction in 1932. He then worked as a private tutor while he was writing his doctoral thesis. In 1939 he received his doctorate at the mathematics faculty of the TH Darmstadt under Alwin Walther on numerical methods for the solution of differential equations ( on the numerical integration of ordinary differential equations of the second and higher order , published in ZAMM, vol. 20, 1940, p. 104). He then worked as a research assistant at the Institute for Practical Mathematics, from 1943 with a teaching position.

After his habilitation in 1962 on the numerical calculation of the eigenvalues of matrices , he was appointed full professor at the Technical University of Berlin in 1963 .

Rudolf Zurmühl achieved great merits through his teaching work on problems in practical mathematics . His textbooks, which were mainly aimed at non-mathematicians, are still of great importance today.

At the age of 62, Zurmühl succumbed to the consequences of a traffic accident.

Fonts

• Matrices and their technical application . Springer Verlag, 1950 (6th edition 1992 by Sigurd Falk ), doi: 10.1007 / 978-3-662-00454-8 (4th edition from 1964)
• Practical mathematics for engineers and physicists . Springer-Verlag , 1953 (5th edition 1965 and as a reprint 1984, ISBN 3-540-03435-8 , doi: 10.1007 / 978-3-642-62022-5 )

literature

• Karl-Eugen Kurrer : The History of the Theory of Structures. Searching for Equilibrium , Berlin: Ernst & Sohn 2018, pp. 840f., ISBN 978-3-433-03229-9 .
• Klaus Biener: Rudolf Zurmühl - passionate didact , RZ-Mitteilungen, Volume 20, 2000, pp. 51–52, DOI: 10.18452 / 6319 .