Oskar Bolza

Oskar Bolza ( born May 12, 1857 in Bergzabern, county Palatinate, Kingdom of Bavaria, † July 5, 1942 in Freiburg im Breisgau ) was a German mathematician.

Life

Bolzas father, Emil Moritz Bolza (1828-1891), was a judge, the father of his mother Louise Koenig (1830-1928), Friedrich Koenig, inventor of the flatbed press. Oskar Bolzas brother Albrecht Bolza ( May 19, 1862 Dahn, † July 25, 1943 ) took over the Grandfather Druckmaschinen company. The sister of Oskar Bolzas, Eleanor Bolza, lived from October 14, 1864 ( Dahn ) to 3 February 1923 ( Hildesheim ).

Oskar Bolza initially studied engineering, then physics and mathematics from 1878 in Berlin ( under Karl Weierstrass ), Heidelberg, Strasbourg and Göttingen ( with Hermann Amandus Schwarz ). After graduating, he taught first at a high school in Freiburg, then earned his doctorate in 1886 in Göttingen but with Felix Klein. In 1887 he was in England (Cambridge, Edinburgh, London) and then moved to the U.S.. In 1888 he was Reader at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, 1889 Associate Professor at Clark University in Worcester and from 1893 at the University of Chicago recently founded (at the same place there for the World Expo, an international Congress of Mathematicians with substantial participation by Felix Klein instead ), where he became professor in 1894. In 1910 he went back to Germany, where he was an honorary professor at the University of Freiburg, where he retired in 1933. At the same time he remained an honorary professor in Chicago.

He was a member of the American Mathematical Society and the German Mathematical Society.

Bolza became known for his derivation of the reduction of hyperelliptic integrals to elliptic and his contributions in the field of variational calculus, which he further developed in connection to his teacher Weierstrass, Adolf Kneser, David Hilbert. In 1901 he published his textbook Lectures on the Calculus of Variations, in German edition first 1908/9 launched until 1945.

Later he dealt with religious themes (which he studied Sanskrit ) and published in 1930 under the pseudonym Marneck the book Lose faith religion. 1912 Bolza was appointed a member of the Leopoldina.

Among his students is one of Gilbert Ames Bliss.

Hans Bolza was his nephew.