Friederich Pius Philipp Furtwängler (April 21, 1869 – May 19, 1940) was a German

number theorist 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 integer-valued functions. German mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss (1777–1855) said, "Mathe ...

Biography

Furtwängler wrote an 1896 doctoral dissertation 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 i ...

cubic form In mathematics, a cubic form is a homogeneous polynomial of degree 3, and a cubic hypersurface is the zero set of a cubic form. In the case of a cubic form in three variables, the zero set is a cubic plane curve. In , Boris Delone and Dmitry Fadd ...

s (''Zur Theorie der in Linearfaktoren zerlegbaren ganzzahligen ternären kubischen Formen''), 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 ...

. Most of his academic life, from 1912 to 1938, was spent at the

University of Vienna The University of Vienna (german: Universität Wien) is a public research university located in Vienna, Austria. It was founded by Duke Rudolph IV in 1365 and is the oldest university in the German-speaking world. With its long and rich h ...

, where he taught for example

Kurt Gödel Kurt Friedrich Gödel ( , ; April 28, 1906 – January 14, 1978) was a logician, mathematician, and philosopher. Considered along with Aristotle and Gottlob Frege to be one of the most significant logicians in history, Gödel had an imm ...

, who later said that Furtwängler's lectures on number theory were the best mathematical lectures that he ever heard; Gödel had originally intended to become a physicist but turned to mathematics partly as a result of Furtwängler's lectures. Furtwängler was paralysed and, without notes, lectured from a wheelchair while his assistant wrote equations on the blackboard. Some of Furtwängler's doctoral students were

Wolfgang Gröbner Wolfgang Gröbner (11 February 1899 – 20 August 1980) was an Austrian mathematician. His name is best known for the Gröbner basis, used for computations in algebraic geometry. However, the theory of Gröbner bases for polynomial rings was dev ...

Nikolaus Hofreiter Nikolaus Hofreiter (8 May 1904 – 23 January 1990) was an Austrian mathematician who worked mainly in number theory. Biography Hofreiter went to school in Linz and studied from 1923 in Vienna with Hans Hahn (mathematician), Hans Hahn, Wilhelm Wi ...

Henry Mann Henry Berthold Mann (27 October 1905, Vienna – 1 February 2000, Tucson) was a professor of mathematics and statistics at the Ohio State University. Mann proved the Schnirelmann-Landau conjecture in number theory, and as a result earned the 19 ...

Otto Schreier Otto Schreier (3 March 1901 in Vienna, Austria – 2 June 1929 in Hamburg, Germany) was a Jewish-Austrian mathematician who made major contributions in combinatorial group theory and in the topology of Lie groups. Life His parents were the arch ...

, and

Olga Taussky-Todd Olga Taussky-Todd (August 30, 1906, Olomouc, Austria-Hungary (present-day Olomouc, Czech Republic) – October 7, 1995, Pasadena, California) was an Austrian and later Czech-American mathematician. She published more than 300 research papers on ...

. Through these and others, he has over 3000 academic descendants. He is now best known for his contribution to the

principal ideal theorem In mathematics, the principal ideal theorem of class field theory, a branch of algebraic number theory, says that extending ideals gives a mapping on the class group of an algebraic number field to the class group of its Hilbert class field, whic ...

in the form of his ''Beweis des Hauptidealsatzes für Klassenkörper algebraischer Zahlkörper'' (1929). Philipp Furtwängler was a grandson of the organ builder Philipp Furtwängler (1800-1867) and a second cousin of the conductor

Wilhelm Furtwängler Gustav Heinrich Ernst Martin Wilhelm Furtwängler ( , , ; 25 January 188630 November 1954) was a German conductor and composer. He is widely regarded as one of the greatest symphonic and operatic conductors of the 20th century. He was a major ...

Selected publications

*with

Helmut Hasse Helmut Hasse (; 25 August 1898 – 26 December 1979) was a German mathematician working in algebraic number theory, known for fundamental contributions to class field theory, the application of ''p''-adic numbers to local class field theory a ...

and W. Jehne: Allgemeine Theorie der algebraischen Zahlen. Vol. 8. Teubner, 1953.

References

Sources

* *

External links

* * http://bibliothek.bbaw.de/kataloge/literaturnachweise/furtwaen/literatur.pdf (PDF-Datei; 35 kB)
Friederich Pius Philipp Furtwängler
at the

MacTutor History of Mathematics archive The MacTutor History of Mathematics archive is a website maintained by John J. O'Connor and Edmund F. Robertson and hosted by the University of St Andrews in Scotland. It contains detailed biographies on many historical and contemporary mathema ...

20th-century German mathematicians Austrian mathematicians 1869 births 1940 deaths 19th-century German mathematicians Number theorists Austro-Hungarian mathematicians Academics of the University of Vienna University of Göttingen alumni People from Lower Saxony {{Germany-mathematician-stub

Biography

Selected publications

See also

References

Sources

External links