Wolfskehl Prize
The Wolfskehl Prize was donated by Paul Friedrich Wolfskehl (1856–1906).
This prize was announced in 1908 by the Royal Society of Science in Göttingen for the proof of Fermat's great theorem . According to the will of the founder, the prize was originally endowed with the enormous sum of 100,000 gold marks .
According to Wolfskehl's will, the prize should be awarded within 100 years, the last possible in 2007. The prize money was not only awarded for the proof of the conjecture, but also for a counterexample, but the winner would then have to specify necessary and sufficient conditions for the exponents of the Fermat equation for which the conjecture does not apply. It could only be paid out two years after the evidence was published. The evidence had to be published in a recognized scientific journal or book.
In the first year alone there were 621 submissions and the stream of amateurs who sent in solutions did not dry up over the years and even continued after the 1997 award. At the Mathematical Institute in Göttingen, one or two assistants were busy with the processing, but the Berlin Academy (like many university institutes still today) received solutions. In Berlin, the amateur mathematician and doctor Albert Fleck (1861–1943) made a contribution to unmasking the many often difficult to discover errors in the solutions sent (his workplace was called the Fermat Clinic ), for which he did so in 1914 at the suggestion of the mathematicians Berlin Academy received the Silver Leibniz Medal. It was also he who found a mistake in the famous mathematician Ferdinand Lindemann's attempt to prove the Fermat conjecture in 1908.
In the literature, beginning with Eric Temple Bell in his popular Men of Mathematics (1937) and continuing in Paulo Ribenboim's book on the Fermat conjecture, it has been claimed that the hyperinflation of the 1920s reduced the prize money to penny amounts . The Göttingen Academy, which was regularly stocked up with attempted solutions by amateurs , did not do much to correct this impression. The prize was worth around DM 27,000 in the mid-1970s and DM 75,000 when it was paid out in 1997. The Göttingen mathematicians were able to use the interest on the prize for themselves at times and thus invited Henri Poincaré and Niels Bohr to lectures at the beginning of the 20th century, for example a.
Most of Wolfskehl's foundation assets were lost because the wealth trustees of the Königliche Gesellschaft der Wissenschaften zu Göttingen were forced to invest a high percentage of the outstanding prize money in 1914, at the beginning of the First World War, instead of investing in gilt-edged bonds as stipulated in the will Draw war bonds . Thomas Adam, historian from the University of Texas and a specialist in foundation history, says: “About 2/3 of the estimated war costs of about 146 billion marks were raised through war bonds. The total of nine war bonds were sold to investors as a safe investment. While investors voluntarily acquired these war bonds with 5% interest, independent and dependent foundations were put under massive pressure to invest their foundation capital in war bonds. Initial invitations very quickly gave way to official directives that left no doubt about the limited scope of action of the foundation administrators. The Prussian government not only left it with appeals to the patriotic attitudes of the foundation administrators, but even openly threatened expropriation if foundations resisted. ”The same author says of the fate of these foundations under the Weimar government:“ In the Loan Redemption Act of 16 In July 1925, however, the government decided to devalue its payment obligations from the war bonds to 2.5% of their nominal value. With this law, the state reduced its domestic debt from 70 billion marks to 1.75 billion marks. This law, and not hyperinflation, contributed to the widespread expropriation of the foundations and drove many foundations into ruin that had invested their foundation capital in war bonds in accordance with government orders, relying on the state. ”The foundation assets of the Wolfskehl Prize were set at 20,000 Reichsmarks. Apparently not the entire sum of 100,000 gold marks had gone into the war loan.
After it was established around 1995 that the Fermat conjecture was proven, the Wolfskehl Prize was handed over to Andrew Wiles on June 27, 1997 in Göttingen . The 100th anniversary of the competition brief of Wolfskehl Prize organized by Technical University of Darmstadt , a colloquium , which was also attended by Andrew Wiles.
literature
- Klaus Barner: Paul Wolfskehl and the Wolfskehl Prize (PDF; 278 kB) . In: Notices AMS , Volume 44. Number 10, November 1997.
Web links
Individual evidence
- ↑ published among other things in the annual report of the German Mathematicians Association, the communications of the academy, in the Mathematische Annalen and in the Acta Mathematica, digitized version of the imprint ( Memento of the original from September 28, 2010 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link became automatic used and not yet tested. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. (PDF file; 158 kB)
- ↑ 100,000 gold marks corresponded to about 35.8 kg of gold
- ↑ Letter from Schlichting from 1974 to Ribenboim, printed in Ribenboim Fermat's Last Theorem , 1979, p. 15. Schlichting, who at the time was processing the submissions of evidence at the Göttingen Mathematical Institute, spoke of 3 to 4 submissions per month (the “How math looked” and was therefore processed) and three meters of correspondence that had accumulated. According to Schlichting, the price was worth DM 10,000 at the time.
- ^ Barner: Wolfskehl and the Wolfskehl Prize , Notices AMS 1997.
- ↑ Schlichting, quoted in Ribenboim, loc. Cit. After the Second World War, however, the remaining amount was not touched.
- ^ Friedrich Hund , interview with Schaaf
- ↑ Jörg Feuck: Colloquium with Andrew Wiles on the 100th anniversary of the Paul Wolfskehl Prize on June 30th . TU Darmstadt, June 20, 2008.
- ↑ Official website for the celebratory colloquium 100 years of the Wolfskehl Prize at TU Darmstadt ( Memento of the original from September 26, 2010 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link has been inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.
