Norbert Schappacher (born 8 October 1950 in

Essen Essen (; Latin: ''Assindia'') is the central and, after Dortmund, second-largest city of the Ruhr, the largest urban area in Germany. Its population of makes it the fourth-largest city of North Rhine-Westphalia after Cologne, Düsseldorf and D ...

) is a German mathematician and historian of mathematics. He was an Invited Speaker at the

International Congress of Mathematicians The International Congress of Mathematicians (ICM) is the largest conference for the topic of mathematics. It meets once every four years, hosted by the International Mathematical Union (IMU). The Fields Medals, the Nevanlinna Prize (to be rename ...

in 2010 in

Hyderabad Hyderabad ( ; , ) is the capital and largest city of the Indian state of Telangana and the ''de jure'' capital of Andhra Pradesh. It occupies on the Deccan Plateau along the banks of the Musi River (India), Musi River, in the northern part ...

Education and career

After secondary education at Essen's ''Burggymnasium'', Schappacher studied from 1969 to 1971 at the

University of Bonn The Rhenish Friedrich Wilhelm University of Bonn (german: Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität Bonn) is a public research university located in Bonn, North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany. It was founded in its present form as the ( en, Rhine U ...

, where he was taught by (among others)

Günter Harder Günter Harder (born 14 March 1938 in Ratzeburg) is a German mathematician, specializing in arithmetic geometry and number theory. Education and career Harder studied mathematics and physics in Hamburg und Göttingen. Simultaneously with the St ...

and

Friedrich Hirzebruch Friedrich Ernst Peter Hirzebruch ForMemRS (17 October 1927 – 27 May 2012) was a German mathematician, working in the fields of topology, complex manifolds and algebraic geometry, and a leading figure in his generation. He has been described as ...

. Schappacher obtained his ''Vordiplom'' in 1971 at the

University of Göttingen The University of Göttingen, officially the Georg August University of Göttingen, (german: Georg-August-Universität Göttingen, known informally as Georgia Augusta) is a public research university in the city of Göttingen, Germany. Founded ...

, where he studied from 1971 to 1974 and was taught by (among others)

Hans Grauert Hans Grauert (8 February 1930 in Haren, Emsland, Germany – 4 September 2011) was a German mathematician. He is known for major works on several complex variables, complex manifolds and the application of sheaf theory in this area, which ...

, Ulrich Stuhler, and

Martin Kneser Martin Kneser (21 January 1928 – 16 February 2004) was a German mathematician. His father Hellmuth Kneser and grandfather Adolf Kneser were also mathematicians. He obtained his PhD in 1950 from Humboldt University of Berlin with the disser ...

. For the academic year 1974–1975, Schappacher studied as an exchange student at the

University of California, Berkeley The University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley, Berkeley, Cal, or California) is a public land-grant research university in Berkeley, California. Established in 1868 as the University of California, it is the state's first land-grant u ...

, where his teachers included

Tsit Yuen Lam Tsit Yuen Lam (;Faculty Website
retrieved 2014-08-13. born 6 February 1942

and

Robin Hartshorne __NOTOC__ Robin Cope Hartshorne ( ; born March 15, 1938) is an American mathematician who is known for his work in algebraic geometry. Career Hartshorne was a Putnam Fellow in Fall 1958 while he was an undergraduate at Harvard University (under ...

. At the University of Göttingen, Schappacher received his ''

Diplom A ''Diplom'' (, from grc, δίπλωμα ''diploma'') is an academic degree in the German-speaking countries Germany, Austria, and Switzerland and a similarly named degree in some other European countries including Albania, Bulgaria, Belarus ...

'' in 1975 and from 1977 to 1986 held the position of assistant at the Göttingen Mathematical Institute. There in 1978 he received his doctorate with advisor Martin Kneser and thesis ''Eine diophantische Invariante von Singularitäten über nichtarchimedischen Körpern'' (A diophantine invariant of singularities over non-Archimedean fields). He was from 1979 to 1981 at

Paris-Sud University Paris-Sud University (French: ''Université Paris-Sud''), also known as University of Paris — XI (or as Université d'Orsay before 1971), was a French research university distributed among several campuses in the southern suburbs of Paris, in ...

(University of Paris XI) in

Orsay Orsay () is a Communes of France, commune in the Essonne Departments of France, department in Île-de-France in northern France. It is located in the southwestern suburbs of Paris, France, from the Kilometre Zero, centre of Paris. A fortifie ...

with

John H. Coates John Henry Coates (26 January 1945 – 9 May 2022) was an Australian mathematician who was the Sadleirian Professor of Pure Mathematics at the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom from 1986 to 2012. Early life and education Coates ...

and for the academic year 1983–1984 at the

Max-Planck-Institut für Mathematik The Max Planck Institute for Mathematics (german: Max-Planck-Institut für Mathematik, MPIM) is a prestigious research institute located in Bonn, Germany. It is named in honor of the German physicist Max Planck and forms part of the Max Planck So ...

(MPI) in

Bonn The federal city of Bonn ( lat, Bonna) is a city on the banks of the Rhine in the German state of North Rhine-Westphalia, with a population of over 300,000. About south-southeast of Cologne, Bonn is in the southernmost part of the Rhine-Ruhr r ...

with Günter Harder. Schappacher in 1985 was an assistant professor (''Professeur associé'') at Paris-Sud University and habilitated in 1986 at the University of Göttingen with thesis ''Periods of Hecke operators''. He was in 1986 at the

Mathematical Sciences Research Institute The Simons Laufer Mathematical Sciences Institute (SLMath), formerly the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute (MSRI), is an independent nonprofit mathematical research institution on the University of California campus in Berkeley, Califo ...

(MSRI) in Berkeley, then worked in 1987 as an assistant professor in Orsay and was from 1987 to 1991 a Heisenberg fellow at the MPI in Bonn. He was at the

Institute for Advanced Study The Institute for Advanced Study (IAS), located in Princeton, New Jersey, in the United States, is an independent center for theoretical research and intellectual inquiry. It has served as the academic home of internationally preeminent scholar ...

for five months in 1990. Schappacher is since 1991 a professor at the

University of Strasbourg The University of Strasbourg (french: Université de Strasbourg, Unistra) is a public research university located in Strasbourg, Alsace, France, with over 52,000 students and 3,300 researchers. The French university traces its history to the ea ...

. From 2002 to 2004 he was a visiting professor at TU Darmstadt and returned in 2004 to the University of Strasbourg. He has held visiting positions at several academic institutions, including the

Isaac Newton Institute The Isaac Newton Institute for Mathematical Sciences is an international research institute for mathematics and its many applications at the University of Cambridge. It is named after one of the university's most illustrious figures, the mathema ...

(for 2 months in 1997),

Mumbai Mumbai (, ; also known as Bombay — the official name until 1995) is the capital city of the Indian state of Maharashtra and the ''de facto'' financial centre of India. According to the United Nations, as of 2018, Mumbai is the second- ...

Tata Institute of Fundamental Research Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR) is a public deemed research university located in Mumbai, India that is dedicated to basic research in mathematics and the sciences. It is a Deemed University and works under the umbrella of the D ...

(for 2 months in 2000–2001), and the

Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Göttingen A German Akademie is a school or college, trade school or another educational institution. The word Akademie (unlike the words Gymnasium or Universität) is not protected by law and any school or college may choose to call itself Akademie. A Somm ...

(as Gauss-Professor in summer 2007). In 2011–2012 he was a Fellow of ''Lichtenberg-Kolleg'', Göttingen. Schappacher's research is primarily on

number theory Number theory (or arithmetic or higher arithmetic in older usage) is a branch of pure mathematics devoted primarily to the study of the integers and arithmetic function, integer-valued functions. German mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss (1777� ...

arithmetic geometry In mathematics, arithmetic geometry is roughly the application of techniques from algebraic geometry to problems in number theory. Arithmetic geometry is centered around Diophantine geometry, the study of rational points of algebraic variety, alg ...

, and the history of mathematics. He has done research on the history of mathematics in Germany during the era of National Socialism (including

Edmund Landau Edmund Georg Hermann Landau (14 February 1877 – 19 February 1938) was a German mathematician who worked in the fields of number theory and complex analysis. Biography Edmund Landau was born to a Jewish family in Berlin. His father was Leopold ...

Oswald Teichmüller Paul Julius Oswald Teichmüller (; 18 June 1913 – 11 September 1943) was a German mathematician who made contributions to complex analysis. He introduced quasiconformal mappings and differential geometric methods into the study of Riemann surfac ...

and the Mathematical Institute in Göttingen), as well as historical research on

Kurt Heegner Kurt Heegner (; 16 December 1893 – 2 February 1965) was a German private scholar from Berlin, who specialized in radio engineering and mathematics. He is famous for his mathematical discoveries in number theory and, in particular, the Stark–He ...

Bartel Leendert van der Waerden Bartel Leendert van der Waerden (; 2 February 1903 – 12 January 1996) was a Dutch mathematician and historian of mathematics. Biography Education and early career Van der Waerden learned advanced mathematics at the University of Amsterd ...

Diophantus of Alexandria Diophantus of Alexandria ( grc, Διόφαντος ὁ Ἀλεξανδρεύς; born probably sometime between AD 200 and 214; died around the age of 84, probably sometime between AD 284 and 298) was an Alexandrian mathematician, who was the aut ...

, and

Leonhard Euler Leonhard Euler ( , ; 15 April 170718 September 1783) was a Swiss mathematician, physicist, astronomer, geographer, logician and engineer who founded the studies of graph theory and topology and made pioneering and influential discoveries in ma ...

. Since 2008 Schappacher is a member of the

Euler Committee of the Swiss Academy of Sciences The Euler Committee of the Swiss Academy of Sciences (also known as the Euler Committee or the Euler Commission) was founded in July 1907 with the objective of publishing the entire scientific production of Leonhard Euler in four series collectively ...

. He was from 2009 to 2016 editor-in-chief of the ''Revue d'histoire des mathématiques'' and is the managing editor of the ''

Elemente der Mathematik ''Elemente der Mathematik'' is a peer-reviewed scientific journal covering mathematics. It is published by the European Mathematical Society, European Mathematical Society Publishing House on behalf of the Swiss Mathematical Society. It was establ ...

''. In 2011 he was elected a corresponding member of the

Selected publications

Articles

* with

in: * with

: ''Fachverband – Institut – Staat. Streiflichter auf das Verhältnis von Mathematik zu Gesellschaft und Politik in Deutschland seit 1890 unter besonderer Berücksichtigung der Zeit des Nationalsozialismus''. In: Gerd Fischer,

Winfried Scharlau Winfried Scharlau (12 August 1940, in Berlin – 26 November 2020) was a German mathematician. Biography Scharlau received his doctorate in 1967 from the University of Bonn. His doctoral thesis ''Quadratische Formen und Galois-Cohomologie'' (Qua ...

, Willi Törnig (eds.): ''Ein Jahrhundert Mathematik 1890-1990. Festschrift zum Jubiläum der DMV.'' Vieweg, Braunschweig 1990, (Dokumente zur Geschichte der Mathematik 6), pp. 1–82 *''On the history of Hilbert's twelfth problem,'' in: Michele Audin (ed.), Matériaux pour l'histoire des mathématiques au XXe siècle Actes du colloque à la mémoire de Jean Dieudonné (Nice 1996), SMF 1998 *
Das Mathematische Institut der Universität Göttingen 1929–1950
' in Heinrich Becker, Hans-Joachim Dahms, Cornelia Wegener (eds.): ''Die Universität Göttingen unter dem Nationalsozialismus'' (2nd expanded edition), K. G. Saur, München 1998, pp. 523–551 (More detailed typescript from 1983 in a new version from April 200
online
* * "Seventy years ago: The Bourbaki Congress at El Escorial and other mathematical (non) events of 1936." I
''The Mathematical Intelligencer, Special issue International Congress of Mathematicians Madrid August''
pp. 8–15. 2006. *

Books

* ''Periods of Hecke characters'', Springer-Verlag, Berlin 1988, (Lecture Notes in Mathematics 1301)
2006 reprint
* as editor, with

Michael Rapoport Michael Rapoport (born 2 October 1948) is an Austrian mathematician. Career Rapoport received his PhD from Paris-Sud 11 University in 1976, under the supervision of Pierre Deligne. He held a chair for arithmetic algebraic geometry at the Univ ...

and Peter Schneider: ''Beilinson’s conjectures on special values of L-functions'', Academic Press, Boston 1988, (Oberwolfach-Tagung; Perspectives in Mathematics 4)
2014 reprint
* as editor, with Alexander Reznikov: ''Regulators in analysis, geometry and number theory'', Birkhäuser, Basel 2000, (Progress in Mathematics 171)
2012 reprint
* as editor, with

Catherine Goldstein : Catherine Goldstein (born July 5, 1958 in Paris) is a French number theorist and historian of mathematics who works as a director of research at the (IMJ). She was president of L'association femmes et mathématiques in 1991. Education and ca ...

Joachim Schwermer Joachim Schwermer (26 May 1950, Kulmbach) is a German mathematician, specializing in number theory. Schwermer received his ''Abitur'' in 1969 at Aloisiuskolleg in Bad Godesberg and then studied mathematics at the University of Bonn. After graduati ...

''The shaping of arithmetic after C. F. Gauss’s Disquisitiones Arithmeticae.''
Springer-Verlag, Berlin 2007, * as editor, with Heinrich Begehr, Helmut Koch, Jürg Kramer, and Ernst-Jochen Thiele:

References

External links

{{DEFAULTSORT:Schappacher, Norbert 20th-century German mathematicians 21st-century German mathematicians German historians of mathematics University of Göttingen alumni Academic staff of the University of Strasbourg 1950 births Living people