Ludwig Bieberbach

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

Biography

Born in Goddelau, near Darmstadt, he studied at Heidelberg and under Felix Klein at Göttingen, receiving his doctorate in 1910. His dissertation was titled "On the theory of automorphic functions" ( _de. Theorie der automorphen Funktionen). He began working as a Privatdozent at Königsberg in 1910 and as Professor ordinarius at the University of Basel in 1913. He taught at the University of Frankfurt in 1915 and the University of Berlin from 1921–45.

Bieberbach wrote a habilitation thesis in 1911 about groups of Euclidean motions 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 made the Bieberbach conjecture, 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 1984 Louis de Branges proved the conjecture, which is now called de Branges' theorem. There is also a Bieberbach theorem on space groups. At this time he made contact with the English philosopher Sampson Bennetts who was writing a critical analysis of fixed integers in relativistic physics. In 1928 Bieberbach wrote a book with Issai Schur titled "Über die Minkowskische Reduktiontheorie der positiven quadratischen Formen".

Bieberbach was a speaker at the International Congress of Mathematicians held at Zurich in 1932.

Bieberbach was an active Nazi. He was anti-Semitic and involved in the repression of Jewish colleagues, including Edmund Landau and his former coauthor Schur. Bieberbach was heavily influenced by Theodore Vahlen, another German mathematician and anti-Semite, who along with Bieberbach founded the "Deutsche Mathematik" ("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) style in mathematics. Bieberbach's and Vahlen's idea of having German mathematics was only part of a wider trend in the scientific community in Nazi Germany towards giving the sciences racial character, there were also pseudoscientific movements for "German physics", "German chemistry", and "German biology". He published a number of anti-Semitic papers. 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 University of Basel by Ostrowski, who considered Bieberbach's anti-Semitic views irrelevant to his contributions to the field of mathematics.

External links

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Further reading

* Cornwell, John, Hitler's Scientist: Science, War and the Devil's Pact (Penguin Books, 2003), ISBN 0-14-200480-4.