Werner Fennel
Moritz Werner Fenchel (born May 3, 1905 in Berlin , † January 24, 1988 in Copenhagen ) was a Danish mathematician with German roots.
Life
Fennel was the son of a merchant, his younger brother was the architect Heinz Fenchel . From 1923 he studied mathematics and physics (with Erwin Schrödinger ) at the Humboldt University in Berlin , where he received his doctorate in 1928 with Ludwig Bieberbach ( On the curvature and winding of closed space curves , Mathematische Annalen Vol. 101, 1929, p. 238). From 1928 to 1933 he was Edmund Landau's assistant at the University of Göttingen . In 1930 he was a Rockefeller Fellow on guest stays in Copenhagen with Harald Bohr and Tommy Bonnesen and in Rome with Tullio Levi-Civita . After the handover of power to the National Socialists in 1933, he fled to Denmark, where he made his way with translations and as editor of the Zentralblatt für Mathematik and was a research assistant at the mathematics seminar at the University of Copenhagen before teaching at the Technical University in Copenhagen in 1938 . From 1942 he was a lecturer in mathematics at the University of Copenhagen . In 1943 he fled to Sweden, where he taught at the Danish school in Lund until 1945 . From 1947 he was a lecturer at the Technical University in Copenhagen. From 1949 to 1951 he was in the USA at the University of Southern California , Stanford University and Princeton University . From 1952 he was a mechanics professor at the Technical University in Copenhagen and from 1956 professor at the University of Copenhagen. In 1974 he retired.
Fennel was busy u. a. with differential geometry, geometry of numbers and the theory of convexity, later with the discontinuous groups of movements in the non-Euclidean plane. With Jakob Nielsen , he gave his name to the Fennel-Nielsen coordinates in the Teichmüller area .
In 1946 he was accepted into the Royal Danish Academy of Sciences . He was also a member of the Physiographische Gesellschaft in Lund and the Bavarian Academy of Sciences . 1958 to 1962 he was chairman of the Danish Mathematicians Association and later its honorary member. He published the collected works of Jakob Nielsen .
He had been married to Käte Sperling (1905–1983) since 1933 , who was also a mathematician and Jew who fled Germany and was unable to do a doctorate due to the circumstances of the time. She passed her mathematics teacher examination in Berlin in 1928, was a mathematics teacher for a time, published several essays on group theory and taught part-time in Aarhus at the university in the late 1960s .
Peter Scherk is one of Fennel's students .
Fonts
- with T. Bonnesen: theory of convex bodies. Results of mathematics, Springer-Verlag, 1934, 1974.
- with T. Bonnesen: Elementary Geometry in hyperbolic space. de Gruyter 1989.
- Memories from my student days. In: Yearbook overviews of mathematics. BI Verlag 1980.
- Convexity through the ages. In: Gruber, Wills (editor): Convexity and its applications. Birkhäuser 1983.
Web links
- Literature by and about Werner Fenchel in the catalog of the German National Library
- Fennel website
Individual evidence
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Fennel, Werner |
| ALTERNATIVE NAMES | Fennel, Moritz Werner (full name) |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | German-Danish mathematician |
| DATE OF BIRTH | May 3, 1905 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Berlin |
| DATE OF DEATH | January 24, 1988 |
| Place of death | Copenhagen |