Oswald Teichmüller

Oswald Teichmüller
Born	June 13, 1913(1913-06-13) Nordhausen, German Empire
Died	September 11, 1943(1943-09-11) (aged 30) Dnieper, Soviet Union
Nationality	Nazi Germany
Fields	Mathematics
Alma mater	University of Göttingen
Doctoral advisor	Helmut Hasse
Known for	Teichmüller mapping Teichmüller space

Oswald Teichmüller (June 18, 1913 – September 11, 1943) was a German mathematician who introduced quasiconformal mappings and differential geometric methods into complex analysis.

Life

Teichmüller was born in Nordhausen. He grew up in Sankt Andreasberg and earned his Abitur in 1931. In the same year he started studying mathematics at the University of Göttingen. Among his professors were Richard Courant, Hermann Weyl, Otto Neugebauer, Gustav Herglotz, and Edmund Landau. Teichmüller received his doctorate in 1935 under Helmut Hasse.

He joined the NSDAP in July 1931 and became a member of the Sturmabteilung in August 1931. In 1933 he organized the boycott of his Jewish professor Edmund Landau.^[1] In 1936 and 1937 he attended lectures by Nevanlinna, who sympathized with the Third Reich, where he was a guest professor and, like Brouwer was also considered by the Nazis as "politically reliable" (Rudolf Heß was in charge of the assessment).^[2] Under the influence of Nevanlinna he specialized in geometric function theory. Upon personal authorisation from the Führer, he joined the Wehrmacht in 1939 and was killed fighting on the Eastern Front.

Mathematics

The theory of Teichmüller spaces (a moduli space theory for Riemann surfaces) was developed by Lars Ahlfors, Lipman Bers and others. The Teichmüller representative or Teichmüller character is a construction with p-adic numbers.

Much of Teichmüller's work was published in Deutsche Mathematik, a highly ideological journal founded by Ludwig Bieberbach that contained not only scholarly articles but also race propaganda. Because of the nature of the journal, his papers were hard to find in modern libraries before the publication of his collected works.

Publications

• Teichmüller, Oswald (1982), Ahlfors, Lars V.; Gehring, Frederick W., eds., Gesammelte Abhandlungen, Berlin, New York: Springer-Verlag, ISBN 978-3-540-10899-3, MR649778, http://books.google.com/books?id=BOsZAQAAIAAJ 

Quotation

Friedrich L. Bauer:

" ... he was a genius but as an extreme Nazi shamefully stood out with his agitation against Landau and Courant." (in: Entzifferte Geheimnisse. Methoden und Maximen der Kryptologie. English title: Decrypted Secrets: Methods and Maxims of Cryptology)

References

1. ^ Jüdische Mathematiker im "Dritten Reich"
2. ^ Lehto, Olli: Korkeat maailmat. Rolf Nevanlinnan elämä. Otava, 2001.

External links

• O'Connor, John J.; Robertson, Edmund F., "Oswald Teichmüller", MacTutor History of Mathematics archive, University of St Andrews, http://www-history.mcs.st-andrews.ac.uk/Biographies/Teichmuller.html .
• Oswald Teichmüller at the Mathematics Genealogy Project.
• Papadopoulos, Athanase, ed. (2007), Handbook of Teichmüller theory. Vol. I, IRMA Lectures in Mathematics and Theoretical Physics, 11, European Mathematical Society (EMS), Zürich, doi:10.4171/029, ISBN 978-3-03719-029-6, MR2284826
• Papadopoulos, Athanase, ed. (2009), Handbook of Teichmüller theory. Vol. II, IRMA Lectures in Mathematics and Theoretical Physics, 13, European Mathematical Society (EMS), Zürich, doi:10.4171/055, ISBN 978-3-03719-055-5, MR2524085

Persondata
Name	Teichmuller, Oswald
Alternative names
Short description
Date of birth	June 13, 1913
Place of birth	Nordhausen
Date of death	September 11, 1943
Place of death	Dnieper, Soviet Union