Walter Purkert (born 22 January 1944 in
Trautenau
Trutnov (; german: Trautenau) is a town in the Hradec Králové Region of the Czech Republic. It has about 29,000 inhabitants. The town centre is well preserved and is protected by law as an urban monument zone.
Administrative parts
Trutnov is ...
) is a German mathematician and historian of mathematics.
Lothar Mertens
Lothar Mertens (2 January 1959 – 4 December 2006) was a prolific German historian and social sciences scholar. A principal focus of his output was on the German Democratic Republic (East Germany, 1949–1990).
Life and work
Lothat Mertens wa ...
: ''Lexikon der DDR-Historiker. Biographien und Bibliographien zu den Geschichtswissenschaftlern aus der Deutschen Demokratischen Republik.'' Saur, München 2006, ISBN 3-598-11673-X.
Career
Purkert received his doctorate (
''Promotion'') in 1972 from
Leipzig University
Leipzig University (german: Universität Leipzig), in Leipzig in Saxony, Germany, is one of the world's oldest universities and the second-oldest university (by consecutive years of existence) in Germany. The university was founded on 2 December ...
. His thesis ''Die Entwicklung des abstrakten Körperbegriffs'' (The development of the abstract concept of the
algebraic structure
In mathematics, an algebraic structure consists of a nonempty set ''A'' (called the underlying set, carrier set or domain), a collection of operations on ''A'' (typically binary operations such as addition and multiplication), and a finite set of ...
called a
field
Field may refer to:
Expanses of open ground
* Field (agriculture), an area of land used for agricultural purposes
* Airfield, an aerodrome that lacks the infrastructure of an airport
* Battlefield
* Lawn, an area of mowed grass
* Meadow, a grass ...
) was supervised by
Hans Wußing. From 1972 to 1979 Purkert was employed in the mathematics section of Leipzig University's mathematics/natural sciences department. In the mathematics section of Leipzig University's department of the history of medicine and the natural sciences, he was from 1979 to 1987 a lecturer (''Dozent''), from 1987 to 1991 a professor extraordinarius, and from 1988 to 1990 the director of the mathematics section.
Purkert was a visiting professor in the summer of 1988 at
Pace University
Pace University is a private university with its main campus in New York City and secondary campuses in Westchester County, New York. It was established in 1906 by the brothers Homer St. Clair Pace and Charles A. Pace as a business school. Pac ...
and for the academic year 1992–1993 at the
University of Wuppertal
The University of Wuppertal (''Universität Wuppertal'') is a German scientific institution, located in Wuppertal, in the state of North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany.
The university's official name in German is ''Bergische Universität Wuppertal'' ...
. He has been a research assistant and professor 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 ...
since the mid-1990s. There he was coordinating editor of the ''Hausdorff Edition''.
[ This annotated edition of the collected works of ]Felix Hausdorff
Felix Hausdorff ( , ; November 8, 1868 – January 26, 1942) was a German mathematician who is considered to be one of the founders of modern topology and who contributed significantly to set theory, descriptive set theory, measure theory, and ...
includes the philosophical and literary writings published under Hausdorff's pseudonym Paul Mongré. The leading editorial committee had five members including, besides Purkert, Egbert Brieskorn
Egbert Valentin Brieskorn (7 July 1936, in Rostock – 11 July 2013, in Bonn) was a German mathematician who introduced Brieskorn spheres and the Brieskorn–Grothendieck resolution.
Education
Brieskorn was born in 1936 as the son of a mill const ...
(the project initiator), 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 ...
, Reinhold Remmert
Reinhold Remmert (22 June 1930 – 9 March 2016) was a German mathematician. Born in Osnabrück, Lower Saxony, he studied mathematics, mathematical logic and physics in Münster. He established and developed the theory of complex-analytic spaces ...
, and Erhard Scholz
Erhard Scholz (born 1947) is a German historian of mathematics with interests in the history of mathematics in the 19th and 20th centuries, historical perspective on the philosophy of mathematics and science, and Hermann Weyl's geometrical methods ...
. There is a first edition done by editors from Germany and four other countries. There is also a supplemented edition. More than twenty mathematicians, historians, philosophers and literary scholars worked together. The edition was carried out as a long-term project by the ''Nordrhein-Westfälische Akademie der Wissenschaften und der Künste'' (North Rhine-Westphalia Academy for Sciences and Arts). The edition comprises 10 separate volumes (IA, IB, and II through IX). The volumes were published between 2001 and 2020 by Springer Verlag
Springer Science+Business Media, commonly known as Springer, is a German multinational publishing company of books, e-books and peer-reviewed journals in science, humanities, technical and medical (STM) publishing.
Originally founded in 1842 in ...
. Purkert completed (during 2013–2018) the biography of Hausdorff (Volume IB of the edition) begun by Egbert Brieskorn (1936–2013) and also edited Hausdorff's correspondence (Volume IX of the edition).[
Purkert was the co-author, with Hans-Joachim Ilgauds, of a well-regarded biography of ]Georg Cantor
Georg Ferdinand Ludwig Philipp Cantor ( , ; – January 6, 1918) was a German mathematician. He played a pivotal role in the creation of set theory, which has become a fundamental theory in mathematics. Cantor established the importance of ...
. Purkert also edited Felix Klein
Christian Felix Klein (; 25 April 1849 – 22 June 1925) was a German mathematician and mathematics educator, known for his work with group theory, complex analysis, non-Euclidean geometry, and on the associations between geometry and group ...
's 1891–1892 lectures in Göttingen on Riemann surfaces.[ In addition to his historical and editorial research, Purkert published mathematical research on ]stochastic analysis
Stochastic calculus is a branch of mathematics that operates on stochastic processes. It allows a consistent theory of integration to be defined for integrals of stochastic processes with respect to stochastic processes. This field was created an ...
.[
]
Honors
In 2005 Purkert gave the historical lecture ''Felix Hausdorff - Mathematiker, Philosoph und Literat'', which was part of the events accompanying the Euler Lecture. He was elected in 2007 a corresponding member of the ''Académie Internationale d’Histoire des Sciences'', Paris and in 2015 a member of the , Basel.[
]
Selected publications
* ''Die Hilbertschen Probleme. Erl. von e. Autorenkollektiv unter d. Red. von P.S. Alexandrov. Vortrag "Mathematische Probleme" von D. Hilbert, gehalten auf d. 2. Internat. Mathematikerkongress Paris 1900'' (translated into German from the Russian original and edited by Hannelore Bernhardt and Walter Burkert), Akademische Verlagsgesellschaft Geest und Portig, Leipzig 1971, 2nd edition 1979, 3rd edition 1983. (See Hilbert's problems
Hilbert's problems are 23 problems in mathematics published by German mathematician David Hilbert in 1900. They were all unsolved at the time, and several proved to be very influential for 20th-century mathematics. Hilbert presented ten of the pro ...
.)
* with Jürgen vom Scheidt: ''Schwach korrelierte Prozesse und ihre Anwendungen'' (Weakly correlated processes and their applications). Akademie-Verlag, Berlin 1980.
* with Jürgen vom Scheidt: ''Random Eigenvalue Problems.'' North Holland 1983.
* with Hans-Joachim Ilgauds: ''Georg Cantor.'' Teubner, 1985, ; Birkhäuser, 1987 (Vita Mathematica)
**
*
* ''Brückenkurs Mathematik für Wirtschaftswissenschaftler'' (Preparatory mathematical course for economists). Teubner, 1995, 9th edition 2022 (Springer/Gabler, Wiesbaden, ).
* with Erhard Scholz:
* with Egbert Brieskorn: ''Felix Hausdorff-Biographie.'' volume IB (in German) of Hausdorff-Edition, Springer 2018.
* ''Felix Hausdorff: Mathematiker, Philosoph und Literat'' (Mathematik im Kontext), Springer 2021.
** ''Felix Hausdorff: Mathematician, Philosopher, Man of Letters''. Springer 2024.
References
{{DEFAULTSORT:Purkert, Walter
1944 births
Living people
German historians of mathematics
20th-century German mathematicians
21st-century German mathematicians
20th-century German historians
21st-century German historians
Leipzig University alumni
Academic staff of Leipzig University
Academic staff of the University of Bonn