Wolfgang Fuchs (mathematician)

Wolfgang Heinrich Johannes Fuchs (born May 19, 1915 in Munich ; died February 24, 1997 in Ithaca ) was a German-American mathematician .

Fuchs graduated from the Johannesgymnasium in Breslau in 1933 . Then he went to Cambridge to study . In 1941 he did his doctorate there with Ingham . Since 1950 he was a professor at Cornell University .

The main area of work of Fuchs was the theory of functions , especially the Nevanlinnasche value distribution theory . Here he made fundamental contributions, many of them in joint work with Edrei . The ellipse theorem of Edrei and Fuchs characterizes the possible Nevanlinna defects of two values for meromorphic functions of order at most 1. Together with Hayman , Fuchs solved the inverse problem of the Nevanlinna theory for whole functions. (For meromorphic functions it was later solved by his student Drasin .)

But Fuchs also worked in other areas. A joint result with Erdős on a problem of additive number theory is known as the Erdős-Fuchs Theorem.

Fuchs was a Guggenheim Fellow (1955) and a Fulbright-Hays Fellow (1973). In 1978 he received the Humboldt Prize . In 1962 he gave a lecture at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Stockholm ( On a conjecture of G. Polya concerning gap series ).

literature

J. Milne Anderson, David Drasin and Linda R. Sons, Wolfgang Heinrich Johannes Fuchs (1915–1997) (PDF; 199 kB), Notices of the American Mathematical Society, Volume 45, Issue 11, pp. 1472–1478, December 1998 .
Werner Röder; Herbert A. Strauss (Ed.): International Biographical Dictionary of Central European Emigrés 1933-1945 . Volume 2.1. Munich: Saur, 1983 ISBN 3-598-10089-2 , p. 349

Web links

Wolfgang Fuchs in the Mathematics Genealogy Project (English)

Individual evidence

^ Donald J. Newman : Analytic Number Theory. Springer-Verlag 1998; especially chapter 3 (The Erdős-Fuchs Theorem)

personal data
SURNAME	Fuchs, Wolfgang
ALTERNATIVE NAMES	Fuchs, Wolfgang Heinrich Johannes
BRIEF DESCRIPTION	German-American mathematician
DATE OF BIRTH	May 19, 1915
PLACE OF BIRTH	Munich
DATE OF DEATH	February 24, 1997
Place of death	Ithaca (New York)

[1] Donald J. Newman : Analytic Number Theory. Springer-Verlag 1998; especially chapter 3 (The Erdős-Fuchs Theorem)