Albrecht Fröhlich

Albrecht Fröhlich, called Ali Cheerful, ( May 22nd, 1916 in Munich, † November 8, 2001 in Cambridge ) was a British mathematician who worked on algebra and number theory.

Life and work

Fröhlich ( whose family came from the Black Forest, and whose father was a cattle dealer) fled with his parents as a Jew from the Nazis first in the Alsace to France and then to Haifa in Palestine, where already lived his sister. He suggested, for example, as a railway electrician. From 1945 he studied at the University of Bristol ( despite the lack of Abitur thanks to the help of his older brother Herbert Fröhlich, a well-known physicist, since 1935 at the University of Bristol), where in 1951 he received his PhD under Hans Heilbronn ( On Some Topics in the Theory of Representation of Groups and Individual Class Field Theory). After that, he was from 1950 to 1952 Lecturer at the University of Leicester and at Keele University ( University College of North Staffordshire, 1952-1955 ), before it was 1955 " Reader" and in 1962 a professor at King's College London from 1969, he was director of the local mathematics faculty. In 1981 he became professor emeritus there and was then at Robinson College, Cambridge University, and Senior Research Fellow at Imperial College London. He has been a visiting professor at the University of Bordeaux (1975, 1984) and in Heidelberg.

Cheerful regarded as the founder of modern algebraic methods themselves ( in the tradition of Emmy Noether, Helmut Hasse ) -use algebraic number theory in the UK, where the number theory was arrested otherwise traditionally strong analytical methods. In 1965 he organized with Ian Cassels in Brighton an influential conference on class field theory, the associated book is one of the standard works on algebraic number theory. Still in 1972 he succeeded to the demonstration of a surprising link between the Galois structure of the ring of integers of an algebraic number field and analytic invariants, the Artin root numbers in the functional equation of the Artin L-functions, a breakthrough. He is regarded as the founder of the arithmetic theory of Galois modules

Cheerful in 1976 a Fellow of the Royal Society. In 1976 he was awarded the Senior Berwick Prize of the London Mathematical Society ( LMS) and 1992 their De Morgan Medal. He was honorary doctorates from the universities of Bristol and Bordeaux and received the 1992 Alexander von Humboldt Research Award. In 1974 he was Invited Lecturer on the ICM ( Galois module structure and Artin L functions). In 1982 he became a member of the Heidelberg Academy of Sciences.

In his honor, the LMS created the Cheerful Award, which is awarded since 2004 every two years for outstanding innovative work in mathematics. The first winner was Ian Grojnowski.

He was married to the doctor Ruth Brooks since 1950.

Among his doctoral students include David Burns (University of London ), Martin Taylor (University of Manchester ) and Colin Bushnell.

Writings

• With Cassels (Editor): Algebraic Number Theory, Academic Press, 1967 ( in Fröhlich Local Fields)
• Formal Groups, Springer, Lecture Notes in Mathematics, 1968
• Galois module structure of algebraic integers, Springer (Results of Mathematics ) 1983
• Central extensions, Galois groups, and ideal class groups of number fields, Providence, Rhode Iceland, American Mathematical Society, 1983
• Class Groups and Hermitian modules, Birkhäuser (Progress in Mathematics Bd.48 ) 1984
• Martin J. Taylor: Algebraic number theory, Cambridge University Press 1991
• Publisher: Algebraic Number fields - L Functions and Galois Properties. Proceedings of a Symposium organized by the LMS, Academic Press 1977