William Threlfall
William Richard Maximilian Hugo Threlfall (born June 25, 1888 in Dresden ; † April 4, 1949 in Oberwolfach ) was a German mathematician who mainly dealt with topology .
life and work
William Threlfall comes from a family of scholars and was the son of an Englishman and a German. His uncle was the well-known physicist and chemist Sir Richard Threlfall. He studied from 1910 to 1914 in Jena and Göttingen , then lived for a long time as a private scholar and only did his doctorate in Leipzig in 1926 under Friedrich Levi and Otto Hölder on regular division of land . In 1927 he completed his habilitation at the TH Dresden , where he also became a private lecturer and gave lectures on topology. This led to the intensive collaboration with his student and close friend Herbert Seifert , which resulted in a textbook on topology that is still valued today and one of the first books on Morse theory .
By nature wealthy, Threlfall was not dependent on a university position (he owned his own house in Dresden). In his own words, the applied mathematician Erich Trefftz , who greatly appreciated Threlfall , brought him back to the university as his assistant. Victor Klemperer describes him in his diaries as the "original", with a strong nationalistic attitude in the 1920s, which however cooled off sharply with the seizure of power by the National Socialists, and suspects the outward appearance of alcoholism.
In 1933 he became associate professor in Dresden, 1935 in Halle (Saale) and from 1937 to 1945 in Frankfurt am Main .
During the Second World War Seifert brought him to his aerodynamics group in Braunschweig and in 1946 secured him a full professorship at the University of Heidelberg . In 1947 he was accepted into the Heidelberg Academy of Sciences .
Threlfall died in Oberwolfach in 1949. During the war he had moved there to the Mathematical Institute newly founded by Wilhelm Süss in the Black Forest with Seifert before the increasing bombing raids and stayed for a few years after that. He died before he could take up his professorship in Heidelberg.
Works (selection)
- Group pictures , Dep. Math.-Phys. Kl. Saxons. Akad. Wiss. 41 (6), 1-59, 1932
- Seifert, Threlfall: Textbook of Topology , Teubner 1934. Scan of the English translation (PDF; 7.4 MB)
- Seifert, Threlfall: Calculus of Variations in the Large. Theory of Marston Morse . [Hamburger Mathematische Einzelschriften, 24th issue]. Leipzig, Teubner, 1938.
literature
- Gabriele Dörflinger: William Threlfall - mathematician. In: Baden biographies. New series, 6 (2011), pp. 403–405. ( Manuscript )
- Henrik Eberle: The Martin Luther University in the time of National Socialism. Mdv, Halle 2002, ISBN 3-89812-150-X , p. 443f
- Dorit Petschel : 175 years of TU Dresden. Volume 3: The professors of the TU Dresden 1828–2003. Edited on behalf of the Society of Friends and Supporters of the TU Dresden e. V. von Reiner Pommerin , Böhlau, Cologne a. a. 2003, ISBN 3-412-02503-8 , p. 959.
Web links
- Heidelberg University to Threlfall
- Review of Tucker's textbook on topology in BAMS 1935, English
- W. Threlfall: Stationary points on closed manifolds , Annual Report of the German Mathematicians Association, Volume 51, pp. 14–33, 1941.
Individual evidence
- ^ Gabriele Dörflinger: Mathematics in the Heidelberg Academy of Sciences . 2014, pp. 81–82
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Threlfall, William |
| ALTERNATIVE NAMES | Threlfall, William Richard Maximilian Hugo (full name) |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | German mathematician and university professor |
| DATE OF BIRTH | June 25, 1888 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Dresden |
| DATE OF DEATH | April 4, 1949 |
| Place of death | Oberwolfach |