- Hanfried Lenz
Hanfried Lenz (* April 22, 1916 in
Munich ) is German mathematician, who's mainly known for his work ingeometry andcombinatorics .Hanfried Lenz is the son of
Fritz Lenz an influential Germangeneticist , who is associated with theNazi racial policies during theThird Reich . He started to studymathematics andphysics at theUniversity of Tübingen , but interrupted his studies from 1935-37 to do his military service. After that he continued to study inMunich ,Berlin andLeipzig . In 1939 whenWWII broke out in Europe, he became a soldier in the western front and during a vacation he passed the exams for his teacher certifification. He married Helene Ranke in 1943 and 1943-45 he worked onradar technology in a laboratory near Berlin.After WWII Hanried Lenz was classified as a "follower" by the denazification process. He started to work as a math and physics teacher in Munich and in 1949 he became an assistant at the
Technical University of Munich . He received his PhD in 1951 and hisHabilitation in 1953. He worked as a lecturer until he became an associate professor in 1959. In 1969 he finally became a full professor at theFree University of Berlin and worked there until his retirement in 1984.He was also politically active and in connection with his opposition to the rebuilding of the German army in the early 50s, he became a member of the Social Democratic Party(SPD) in 1954. Later, partially due to being alienated by student movement of the 60s, his leanings became more conservative again and in 1972 he left the SPD to join the Christian Democratic Union.
Hanfried Lenz is known for his work on the classification of
projective plane s and in 1954 he showed how one can introduce affine spaces axiomatically without constructing them fromprojective space s orvector space s. This result is now known as thetheorem of Lenz . During his later years he also worked in the area of combinatorics and published a book on design theory (together with Dieter Jungnickel and Thomas Beth).In 1995 the
Institute of Combinatorics and its Applications awarded theEuler Medal to Hanfried Lenz.References
* Walter Benz: "Zum mathematischen Werk von Hanfried Lenz", Journal of Geometry 43, 1992 (German)
* Hanfried Lenz: "Mehr Glück als Verstand", Books on Demand 2002, Autobiography (German)
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