Wolfgang Wasow

Wolfgang Wasow (born July 25, 1909 as Wolfgang Richard Thal in Vevey (Switzerland), † September 11, 1993 in Madison (Wisconsin) ) was an American mathematician of German descent.

Family background

As Wolfgang Wasow writes in the 1st chapter of his memoir, he was born out of wedlock as Wolfgang Richard Thal in Vevey in 1909. His mother, Alma Thal, later Alma Lepère, comes from Mitau in Latvia , which was then part of the Russian Empire . The Swiss authorities therefore entered Russian citizenship on Wasov's birth documents. In fact, however, the mother's family had Lithuanian and German-Jewish roots. Alma Thal lived in Switzerland because she was politically active at home and the family wanted to prevent her from further political activities. Here she met Richard Kleineibst, who, born on March 30, 1886 in Weilburg an der Lahn, was a political activist and later co-founded the Socialist Workers' Party of Germany (SAPD) .

In contrast to Richard Kleineibst, the sources on Alma Thal (Lepère) are sparse. The information in the Biographical Handbook of German-Speaking Emigration after 1933 , however, refers to a very eventful life: born in 1886, moved from Vevey to Munich in early 1910, moved to Spain in 1933, worked for the government of the Spanish Republic in Barcelona from 1936 to 1939 , fled to 1939 France, 1941 emigrated to Mexico, where she worked as a photographer. She died in New York in 1950.

Wolfgang Wasow had three siblings or half-siblings: Christel Otto Wasow, * 1917 in Munich, who later lived in Bavaria, Holger Lepère, * 1920 in Berlin, † 1970 in Mexico City, who went through the same escape and exile stations as his mother , but did not follow her to the USA, and Renate Lepère, * 1922 in Berlin, who also went to Spain in 1933, but then to Italy in 1936, where her brother Wolfgang was able to accommodate her as a student at the rural school in Florence and from there to Great Britain in 1938 ; she moved to the USA in 1945.

Childhood, youth, studies

Wolfgang Wasow's childhood took place in many places. His mother moved from Vevey to Munich just eight months after he was born. This was followed by stations in Freiburg, Heidelberg and Berlin before he became a student of the Free School and Work Community in Letzlingen in 1921 . Wasow stayed in this, according to Adolf Grimme, one of the most original reform schools of the Weimar period until 1928, where he also graduated from high school. After graduating from high school, Wolfgang Wasow studied between 1928 and 1933 at the Berlin University, at the Sorbonne in Paris and at the University of Göttingen. Here he also passed the state examination in mathematics, physics and geology in 1933.

European emigration

Immediately after his state examination he emigrated to Paris. He prepared for further university exams and worked as a private tutor. He received support from the International Student Service and the American Friends Service . At the beginning of 1935 he moved to Cambridge.

However, the stay here was very short. He received a letter from Werner Peiser , who was acquainted with his mother and whom he had already met in 1931 during a trip to Italy. Peiser offered him to teach mathematics at the rural school home in Florence . Wasow accepted the offer, although the conditions for his work in Florence were anything but lavish: “My remuneration consisted of room and board and a starvation wage in cash, enough to buy stamps but not enough to give me decent clothes Wasow stayed at the Landschulheim Florenz from February 1935 until the summer of 1937, although the collaboration with Peiser and Robert Kempner , the second headmaster next to Peiser, was not easy for him. On the other hand, close relationships developed with other colleagues, such as Thomas Goldstein , Ernst Moritz Manasse and the two sisters Marianne and Gabrielle Bernhard. Marianne Bernhard later married Ernst Moritz Manasse, and her sister Gabrielle, who had been in Italy since 1936 and came to the Florence rural school home as an art teacher in 1937, became Wolfgang Wasow's first wife in 1939.

The final break occurred in the summer of 1937. When Wolfgang Wasow told Kempner that he had opened letters from him, Kempner gave him notice. Wasow was allowed to go to the school's summer quarters in Bordighera , but there he found a connection to a small Montessori school and left the rural school in Florence. At the end of 1937 Wasow then went to the Alpine school home on Vigiljoch / Scuola Alpina di Monte San Vigilio . The school home located in the community of Lana was, similar to the rural school home in Florence, a boarding school for students of Jewish-German origin. Located at over 1,400 meters above sea level, it was significantly smaller than the Florence country school home: 35 students were taught by 7 to 8 teachers. In December 1938 the school had to be closed due to the Italian race legislation .

Emigration to the USA and a career as a mathematician

With the support of American aid organizations, again including the American Friends Service, Wolfgang Wasow and his wife Gabrielle were able to travel to the USA in March 1939. Wasow found a job in the same year as a teacher (instructor) for mathematics and German at Goddard College in Plainfield (Vermont), then, from 1941 to 1942 he was a teacher at Connecticut College for women and then from 1942 to 1946 again an instructor (instructor ) in mathematics from New York University .

In parallel to his work at various colleges, Wasow studied at New York University from 1940 to 1942, where he received his doctorate from Kurt Otto Friedrichs in 1942 . His actual academic career began in 1946 with an assistant professorship in mathematics at Swarthmore College, Pennsylvania. This was followed by positions as a researcher at the Numerical Analysis Research Center of the University of California in Los Angeles (1949–1955) and as a researcher at the Mathematical Research Center of the University of Wisconsin in Madison . In between (1954–1955) he was able to work for a year as a Fulbright Fellow and visiting professor in Rome.

1957 Wolfgang Wasow was appointed professor of mathematics at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. In 1973 he was appointed to the Rudolf E. Langer Professorship , which he held until his retirement in 1980.

In addition to the previously mentioned visiting professorship in Rome, Wasow also held the same position in Haifa (1962), at New York University (1964–1965) and at ETH Zurich . Since 1968 he has been associate editor of the Proceedings of the American Mathematical Society and the SIAM Journal on Mathematical Analysis (SIMA) .

The main area of ​​work of Wolfgang Wasow was the theory of differential equations , in particular asymptotic developments of the solutions and the theory of turning points. He has written three books that are now considered classic.

Wolfgang Wasow died on September 11, 1993 in Madison (Wisconsin). After his death, his children donated the Wolfgang Wasow Memorial Lecture at the University of Wiscon , through which one scientist is invited every year.

Family environment

It has already been pointed out that Wolfgang Wasow had been married to Gabrielle Bernhard since 1939, who emigrated to the USA with him in the same year. She was born in Berlin in March 1913, of Jewish descent, and studied art in Berlin and Vienna before she came to Italy in 1936, where she got to know the Florence rural school home through her sister Marianne and also her future husband Wolfgang Wasow. Two children were born in the United States:

• Bernard Wasow, born in 1944, an economist and professor at several American universities and national and international institutions;
• Thomas Wasow, born 1945, a retired linguist and philosopher from Stanford University

Wolfgang and Gabrielle Wasow's marriage ended in divorce in 1959. Wolfgang Wasow then married Mona Cantor, whose two children Robin and David Murie he adopted. In 1960 their son Oliver was born. The marriage ended in divorce in 1980. Wasow's first wife, Gabrielle, has, according to her son, studied art again in the United States. After the divorce, she married the artist Klaus Brill and gained attention with drawings, prints and sculptures. Her grandson, Omar Wasow, posted a print from his grandma online. Gabrielle Brill celebrated her hundredth birthday in March 2013. She had stopped working as an artist two years earlier. After living in Laurel Canyon in the Hollywood Hills near Los Angeles for a long time , she moved to a retirement home in Menlo Park around 2013 to be closer to her son. On an auction page there is a notice that the artists Gabrielle & Klaus Brill have been long-term supporters of advocacy groups for the homeless and that the Brill family will donate the auction proceeds to GAAP, a non-profit organization that supports the homeless. This social commitment coincides with a blog post that says that Gabrielle Brill was still doing volunteer work in a Hollywood soup kitchen in 2002, at the age of eighty-nine.

Works

• Wolfgang R. Wasow: Memories of seventy years: 1909 to 1979 , Madison (Wisconsin), 1986 (self-published). This book is a very detailed autobiography (over 400 pages, including about 40 pages about Wasow's time as a teacher at the rural school in Florence). However, it is difficult to access. In the catalog of the Online Computer Library Center (OCLC) only two copies are recorded worldwide: one in the General Library System of the University of Wisconsin in Madison, and one in the reading room of the German Exile Archive 1933–1945 of the German National Library in Frankfurt.
• Finite Difference Methods for Partial Differential Equations (with George E. Forsythe ), John Wiley & Sons, New York (et al.), 1960.
• Asymptotic expansions for ordinary differential equations , Interscience Publishers, New York, 1965, revised edition 1976.
• Linear Turning Point Theory , Springer-Verlag, New York, 1985

literature

• Biographical handbook of German-speaking emigration after 1933 , ed. from the Institute for Contemporary History under the overall direction of Werner Röder, Volume 2: The arts, sciences, and literature, Part 2: L - Z, Saur, Munich, 1983 (Biography Wolfgang Wasow: pp. 1209-1210)
• Anikó Szabó: eviction, return, reparation. Göttingen university professor in the shadow of National Socialism , Wallstein Verlag GmbH, Göttingen, 2000, ISBN 3-89244-381-5 (biography Wolfgang Wasow: pp. 653–654)
• Irmtraud Ubbens: The country school home in Florence In: Childhood and youth in exile - A generation theme (= exile research. An international yearbook , volume 24, p. 117ff). edition text + kritik, Munich, 2006, ISBN 3-88377-844-3 .
• Robert E. O'Malley Jr .: Wolfgang R. Wasow . Results in Mathematics, Volume 28 (1995), Issue 1-2, pp. 12-14 (obituary).

Web links

• Wolfgang Wasow in the catalog of the German National Library
• The Wolfgang Wasow Lecture series (with a photo by Wolfgang Wasow)
• Wolfgang Wasow on a photograph from 1952
• Photograph by Wolfgang Wasow (right) and his doctoral supervisor Kurt Otto Friedrichs
• Wolfgang Wasow in the Mathematics Genealogy Project (with reference to his dissertation)

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Wolfgang R. Wasow: Memories , pp. 1–11.
2. ↑ Since he (see below) had a stepsister with the name Wasow, the assumption is that the name Wasow was given to him in the course of a later marriage with his mother and an accompanying adoption.
3. ↑ There are many sources on the life of Richard Kleineibst on the Internet. a. also a good biographical overview: biography Richard Kleineibst . He died on April 27, 1976 in Kilchberg near Zurich .
4. ↑ Wolfgang R. Wasow: Memories , p. 12.
5. ↑ Wolfgang R. Wasow: Memories , pp. 12–51.
6. ↑ All of the following biographical data on Wolfgang Wasow - unless explicitly quoted from other sources - are based on the Biographical Handbook of German-speaking Emigration after 1933 (pages 1209–1210) and on Anikó Szabó: Expulsion, return, reparation (pages 653–654) . Individual references to these works are therefore not provided.
7. ↑ The Free School and Work Community Letzlingen
8. ↑ For the work of the American Field Service during the Nazi regime and during the Second World War, please refer to the English language Wikipedia: en: American Friends Service Committee
9. ^ Wolfgang R. Wasow: Memories , p. 163.
10. ↑ translated from Wolfgang R. Wasow: Memories , p. 163.
11. ↑ “There are few people with whom I have dealt in my life that I thoroughly detested. Kempner was one of them. ”Translated from Wolfgang R. Wasow: Memories , p. 176.
12. ↑ cf. also: Irmtraud Ubbens: Das Landschulheim in Florenz , pp. 130-131.
13. ↑ Wolfgang R. Wasow: Memories , p. 186 ff.
14. ↑ The information here about the “Alpine school home on the Vigiljoch / Scuola Alpina di Monte San Vigilio” was taken from the 2008 study “Le leggi razziali antiebraiche fra le due guerre Mondiali” (p. 81). Alpine school home on Vigiljoch / Scuola Alpina di Monte San Vigilio .
15. ↑ It is not clear where the two of them spent after the closure of the Alpine school home on Vigiljoch and from where they began their journey to the USA. Their marriage also presumably took place before entering the USA.
16. ^ Goddard College
17. ↑ On the History of Connecticut College
18. ↑ Wolfgang Wasow in the Mathematics Genealogy Project (with reference to his dissertation)
19. ^ Rudolf Ernst Langer
20. ↑ He probably worked here at the Technion , because the University of Haifa was only founded in 1963.
21. ^ SIAM Journals
22. ↑ Wolfgang Wasow Lectures
23. ↑ All of the following information on Gabrielle Bernhard, Gabrielle Wasow and Gabrielle Brill are based on a short blog post by her son Bernhard Wasow: Bernhard Wasow: About my mother
24. ↑ Short biography of Bernard Wasow
25. ↑ Thomas Wasow's Home Page
26. ↑ In a 2011 publication by the University of Wisconsin, she is mentioned as Professor Emeritus Mona Cantor Wasow: Mona Cantor . Anikó Szabó ( Expulsion, Return, Reparation ) explains that she was born in Rome in 1933 and was a professor of social work.
27. ↑ There are scattered references to works by Gabrielle and Klaus Brill on the Internet. Biographical data on Klaus Brill cannot be found, however.
28. ↑ A print by Gabrielle Brill
29. ↑ Auction offer of a Brill picture
30. ↑ Gabrielle Brill's social commitment
31. ↑ Wolfgang Wasows autobiography in OCLC WorldCat