Walter Roelcke

Walter Roelcke (born December 10, 1928 in Görlitz , † December 24, 2005 in Krailling near Munich ) was a German mathematician.

Life

Roelcke was born in what is now the Polish part of Görlitz and graduated from high school in Heidelberg after fleeing in 1946. He studied mathematics in Heidelberg with a diploma in 1952 and a doctorate in 1954 with Hans Maaß (on the wave equation in boundary circle groups of the first kind). In his dissertation, which was awarded summa cum laude , he investigated Maaß's waveforms using the method of spectral theory of self-adjoint operators and obtained a complete qualitative eigenvalue theory of the Laplace operator on boundary circle groups of the first kind. As a post-doctoral student , he was in Glasgow with Robert Alexander Rankin and 1955/56 at the Institute for Advanced Study with Atle Selberg . In 1957 he became an assistant to Hans Petersson at the University of Münster , where he completed his habilitation in 1960 and became a private lecturer (automorphic functions and spectral theory). In 1964 he was at the University of Wisconsin – Madison for a year . In 1965 he became a full professor at the Ludwig Maximilians University in Munich , where he was temporarily dean of the faculty. In 1994 he retired.

At first he dealt with the eigenvalue theory of automorphic forms in the hyperbolic plane. In a work from 1964 he established the Roelcke-Selberg conjecture, which has not been proven to this day. In Munich he worked on topological vector spaces and topological groups. Here the Roelcke compactification is named after him.

Jürgen Elstrodt and Susanne Dierolf (University of Trier) are among his doctoral students .

Fonts

• About the wave equation and boundary circle groups of the first kind , session reports of the Heidelberg Academy of Sciences, 1953/55, Springer Verlag 1956 (dissertation)
• The eigenvalue problem of automorphic forms in the hyperbolic plane , 2 parts, Mathematische Annalen, Volume 167, 1966, pp. 292–337
• On the fineste locally convex topology agreeing with a given topology on a sequence of absolutely convex sets , Mathematische Annalen, Volume 198, 1972, pp. 57-80
• with Susanne Dierolf Uniform structures on topological groups and their quotients , McGraw Hill 1981

Web links

• Obituary at the University of Munich by Elstrodt, pdf
• Mathematics at the University of Münster, pdf, with biography and photo

Individual evidence

1. ^ Mathematics Genealogy Project