Ludwig Georg Elias Moses Bieberbach (; 4 December 1886 – 1 September 1982) was a German

mathematician A mathematician is someone who uses an extensive knowledge of mathematics in their work, typically to solve mathematical problems. Mathematicians are concerned with numbers, data, quantity, structure, space, models, and change. History On ...

and

Nazi Nazism ( ; german: Nazismus), the common name in English for National Socialism (german: Nationalsozialismus, ), is the far-right totalitarian political ideology and practices associated with Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party (NSDAP) in ...

Biography

Born in Goddelau, near Darmstadt, he studied at

Heidelberg Heidelberg (; Palatine German language, Palatine German: ''Heidlberg'') is a city in the States of Germany, German state of Baden-Württemberg, situated on the river Neckar in south-west Germany. As of the 2016 census, its population was 159,914 ...

and under

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 grou ...

Göttingen Göttingen (, , ; nds, Chöttingen) is a university city in Lower Saxony, central Germany, the capital of the eponymous district. The River Leine runs through it. At the end of 2019, the population was 118,911. General information The ori ...

, receiving his doctorate in 1910. His dissertation was titled ''On the theory of automorphic functions'' (german: Theorie der automorphen Funktionen). He began working as a Privatdozent at

Königsberg Königsberg (, ) was the historic Prussian city that is now Kaliningrad, Russia. Königsberg was founded in 1255 on the site of the ancient Old Prussian settlement ''Twangste'' by the Teutonic Knights during the Northern Crusades, and was name ...

in 1910 and as Professor ordinarius at the

University of Basel The University of Basel (Latin: ''Universitas Basiliensis'', German: ''Universität Basel'') is a university in Basel, Switzerland. Founded on 4 April 1460, it is Switzerland's oldest university and among the world's oldest surviving universit ...

in 1913. He taught at the University of Frankfurt in 1915 and the

University of Berlin Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin (german: Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, abbreviated HU Berlin) is a German public research university in the central borough of Mitte in Berlin. It was established by Frederick William III on the initiative ...

from 1921–45. Bieberbach wrote a habilitation thesis in 1911 about groups of Euclidean motions – identifying conditions under which the group must have a translational subgroup whose vectors span the Euclidean space – that helped solve Hilbert's 18th problem. He worked on complex analysis and its applications to other areas in mathematics. He is known for his work on dynamics in several complex variables, where he obtained results similar to Fatou's. In 1916 he formulated the

Bieberbach conjecture In complex analysis, de Branges's theorem, or the Bieberbach conjecture, is a theorem that gives a necessary condition on a holomorphic function in order for it to map the open unit disk of the complex plane injectively to the complex plane. It ...

, stating a necessary condition for a holomorphic function to map the open unit disc injectively into the complex plane in terms of the function's

Taylor series In mathematics, the Taylor series or Taylor expansion of a function is an infinite sum of terms that are expressed in terms of the function's derivatives at a single point. For most common functions, the function and the sum of its Taylor ser ...

. In 1984

Louis de Branges Louis de Branges de Bourcia (born August 21, 1932) is a French-American mathematician. He is the Edward C. Elliott Distinguished Professor of Mathematics at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana. He is best known for proving the long-stan ...

proved the conjecture (for this reason, the

is sometimes called

de Branges' theorem In complex analysis, de Branges's theorem, or the Bieberbach conjecture, is a theorem that gives a necessary condition on a holomorphic function in order for it to map the open unit disk of the complex plane injectively to the complex plane. It ...

). There is also a on

space group In mathematics, physics and chemistry, a space group is the symmetry group of an object in space, usually in three dimensions. The elements of a space group (its symmetry operations) are the rigid transformations of an object that leave it uncha ...

s. In 1928 Bieberbach wrote a book with

Issai Schur Issai Schur (10 January 1875 – 10 January 1941) was a Russian mathematician who worked in Germany for most of his life. He studied at the University of Berlin. He obtained his doctorate in 1901, became lecturer in 1903 and, after a stay at th ...

titled ''Über die Minkowskische Reduktiontheorie der positiven quadratischen Formen''. Bieberbach was a speaker at the International Congress of Mathematicians held at Zurich in 1932.

Politics

Bieberbach joined the Sturmabteilung in 1933 and the

NSDAP The Nazi Party, officially the National Socialist German Workers' Party (german: Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei or NSDAP), was a far-right political party in Germany active between 1920 and 1945 that created and supported t ...

in 1937. He was enthusiastically involved in the efforts to dismiss his Jewish colleagues, 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 Leopol ...

and his former coauthor

, from their posts. He also facilitated the Gestapo arrests of some close colleagues, such as

Juliusz Schauder Juliusz Paweł Schauder (; 21 September 1899, Lwów, Austria-Hungary – September 1943, Lwów, Occupied Poland) was a Polish mathematician of Jewish origin, known for his work in functional analysis, partial differential equations and m ...

. Bieberbach was heavily influenced by Theodore Vahlen, another German mathematician and anti-Semite, who along with Bieberbach founded the "

Deutsche Mathematik ''Deutsche Mathematik'' (German Mathematics) was a mathematics journal founded in 1936 by Ludwig Bieberbach and Theodor Vahlen. Vahlen was publisher on behalf of the German Research Foundation (DFG), and Bieberbach was chief editor. Other editors ...

" ("German mathematics") movement and journal of the same name. The purpose of the movement was to encourage and promote a "German" (in this case meaning

intuitionistic In the philosophy of mathematics, intuitionism, or neointuitionism (opposed to preintuitionism), is an approach where mathematics is considered to be purely the result of the constructive mental activity of humans rather than the discovery of f ...

) style in mathematics. For example, Bieberbach claimed that "the

Cauchy–Goursat theorem In mathematics, the Cauchy integral theorem (also known as the Cauchy–Goursat theorem) in complex analysis, named after Augustin-Louis Cauchy (and Édouard Goursat), is an important statement about line integrals for holomorphic functions in t ...

arouses intolerable displeasure" in Germans, and was representative of an abstract style of reasoning and "pronounced shrewdness" characteristic of "Jewish mathematics". citing ''Deutsche Zukunft erman Future' of April 8, 1934 and '' esearch and Progress' of June 20, 1934. Bieberbach's and Vahlen's idea of German mathematics was part of a wider trend in the scientific community in Nazi Germany towards giving the sciences racial character; there were also pseudoscientific movements for "

Deutsche Physik ''Deutsche Physik'' (, "German Physics") or Aryan Physics (german: Arische Physik) was a nationalist movement in the German physics community in the early 1930s which had the support of many eminent physicists in Germany. The term was taken ...

", " German chemistry", and " German biology". In 1945, Bieberbach was dismissed from all his academic positions because of his support of Nazism, but in 1949 was invited to lecture at the

by Ostrowski, who considered Bieberbach's political views irrelevant to his contributions to the field of mathematics.. See in particular p. 263: "This high esteem of scientific merits, regardless of political, personal, or other shortcomings of this attaining them, came across already in 1949, when he strowskihad the courage of inviting Bieberbach – then disgraced by his Nazi past and ostracized by the European intelligentsia – to spend a semester as guest of the university of Basel and conduct a seminar on geometric constructions."

References

External links

Author profile
in the database

zbMATH zbMATH Open, formerly Zentralblatt MATH, is a major reviewing service providing reviews and abstracts for articles in pure and applied mathematics, produced by the Berlin office of FIZ Karlsruhe – Leibniz Institute for Information Infrastruct ...

Biography

Politics

See also

References

External links

Further reading