Joachim Nitsche

Joachim Nitsche (born 2 September 1926 in Nossen in Saxony, † 12 January 1996 Freiburg im Breisgau ) was a German mathematician who worked on partial differential equations and numerical analysis.

Life and work

His parents were high school teachers of mathematics and physics. After military service in World War II and a prisoner of war he made in 1946 a high school in Bischofswerda and he studied mathematics from 1947 at the University of Göttingen, where he received his diploma with Franz Rellich. In 1951 he received his doctorate at Wolfgang Haack at the TU Berlin. Two years later he completed his habilitation in 1953 at the Technical University of Berlin with the work of boundary value problems for the embedding and bending of positively curved surface with boundary deterministic pieces and in 1955 lecturer at the Free University Berlin. In 1957 he went to IBM in Böblingen, where he shifted his research field for numerical mathematics.

1958 Nitsche was an adjunct professor at the Albert- Ludwigs- University of Freiburg, where until his retirement in 1991 he held the Chair of Applied Mathematics in 1962. 1971/72 he was Dean of the Faculty of Mathematics.

He was married to Gisela Lange since 1952 and had three children. His brother John Nitsche was also a well-known mathematician.

Research, services

Initially he worked on partial differential equations in the context of differential geometry ( bending of surfaces and embedding of flexural surfaces ). In the numerical analysis, it dealt with spline functions and in particular with finite elements, for example, for the solution of parabolic and elliptic partial differential equations, the error estimation and its convergence properties. He was in this area of the world's leading scientists and stopped about meetings in Oberwolfach (1977, 1980). He also dealt with game theory and optimization tasks. In 1978 he was invited speaker at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Helsinki ( approximation of the one-dimensional Stefan problem by finite elements).