Eduard Ott-Heinrich Keller (22 June 1906 in Frankfurt – 5 December 1990 in

Halle Halle may refer to: Places Germany * Halle (Saale), also called Halle an der Saale, a city in Saxony-Anhalt ** Halle (region), a former administrative region in Saxony-Anhalt ** Bezirk Halle, a former administrative division of East Germany ** Hall ...

) was a German mathematician who worked in the fields of geometry, topology and

algebraic geometry Algebraic geometry is a branch of mathematics, classically studying zeros of multivariate polynomials. Modern algebraic geometry is based on the use of abstract algebraic techniques, mainly from commutative algebra, for solving geometrical ...

. He formulated the celebrated problem which is now called the Jacobian conjecture in 1939. He was born in Frankfurt–am-Main, and studied at the universities of Frankfurt, Vienna, Berlin and Göttingen. As a student of Max Dehn he wrote a dissertation on the tiling of space with

cube In geometry, a cube is a three-dimensional solid object bounded by six square faces, facets or sides, with three meeting at each vertex. Viewed from a corner it is a hexagon and its net is usually depicted as a cross. The cube is the only r ...

s. This led to another 'Keller conjecture': the Keller cube-tiling conjecture from 1930. Subsequently he worked with Georg Hamel in Berlin, habilitating in 1933 with a thesis on

Cremona transformation In algebraic geometry, the Cremona group, introduced by , is the group of birational automorphisms of the n-dimensional projective space over a field It is denoted by Cr(\mathbb^n(k)) or Bir(\mathbb^n(k)) or Cr_n(k). The Cremona group is naturally ...

s. The Jacobian conjecture is quite naturally posed in that setting. The motivation for looking at rather general

polynomial transformations In mathematics, a polynomial transformation consists of computing the polynomial whose roots are a given function of the roots of a polynomial. Polynomial transformations such as Tschirnhaus transformations are often used to simplify the solutio ...

, say of the projective plane, came from the singularity theory for algebraic curves. During World War II he taught in a naval college in

Flensburg Flensburg (; Danish, Low Saxon: ''Flensborg''; North Frisian: ''Flansborj''; South Jutlandic: ''Flensborre'') is an independent town (''kreisfreie Stadt'') in the north of the German state of Schleswig-Holstein. Flensburg is the centre of the ...

. After the war he had several positions, and was appointed a professor at Martin Luther University of Halle-Wittenberg in 1952, as successor of H. W. E. Jung.

References

*
Biography
(in German)

External links

* {{DEFAULTSORT:Keller, EOH 1906 births 1990 deaths 20th-century German mathematicians German geometers Academic staff of the University of Münster