Robert Fricke

Karl Emanuel Robert Fricke (* September 24 1861 in Helmstedt, † July 18, 1930 in Bad Harzburg ) was a German mathematician who worked in close collaboration with Felix Klein with function theory.

Life and work

Fricke grew up in Brunswick on the second of four children of officials and made there in 1880 at the Martino- Katharineum the Abitur. He then studied physics, mathematics and philosophy at the universities of Göttingen, Zurich (Summer 1881), Berlin, Strasbourg and from winter semester 1883 with Felix Klein in Leipzig. In 1885, he passed from his teaching position earned a doctorate in the same year with the work using systems of elliptic modular functions of the lower-level number. After graduation, he worked as a high school teacher at two high schools Brunswick and then leave from regular education service as a private tutor of the sons of Prince Albrecht of Prussia, the then regent of Brunswick. That gave him time for mathematical research, and he rejoined closely to Felix Klein on who had become Professor in 1886 in the near Göttingen. In 1887 they both began to collaborate on a two-volume monograph on Elliptic modular functions, which appeared in 1890 and 1892. In 1891 he completed his habilitation at the University of Kiel ( with the first volume of elliptic modular functions ), in September 1892 he became a Privatdozent in Göttingen. On April 1, 1894 his appointment was as Professor of Higher Mathematics at the Technical University Carolo- Wilhelmina in Braunschweig. 1904 to 1906 and from 1921 to 1923 he was rector of the Technical University of Braunschweig. His successor in Brunswick after his death in 1930 was Kurt Friedrichs.

In Brunswick, Fricke was responsible for the mathematical education of engineering students, a task he took very seriously as a debate in the 1890s about the relevance of higher mathematics (calculus ) shows in the beginner training of engineers, abolish some professors all wanted. Fricke took the opposite stance, translated for this purpose together with Fritz Süchting a textbook of the Englishman John Perry (1850-1920) Calculus for engineers into German.

Also its friendly cooperation with Felix Klein remained until Klein's death in 1925 made ​​( Fricke 1894 married a niece of Felix Klein, Eleonora Flender ). Together they left the monograph on module features a follow on automorphic functions, except that Fricke had the main authorship. The first part appeared in 1897, the last being in 1912. Fricke worked there also the ideas of Henri Poincaré, the great competitors Klein in the field of automorphic functions ( but who had at that time already facing other areas ), a ( Poincaré series ) part, using the work of the early deceased small pupil Ernst Ritter ( 1867-1895 ). The reason for the delay of the last volume included the only progress made in the 1910s at the uniformization, in particular with regard to more stringent topological foundations. Fricke also wrote the sections on automorphic and elliptic functions in the Encyclopedia of Mathematical Sciences, published in 1913.

Fricke was also interested in group theory, primarily caused by his study of automorphic functions - by Jeremy Gray lie in these studies by Klein and Fricke the roots of the Galois theory of the function body. The monographs on elliptic modular functions and automorphic functions form the continuation of Felix Klein's lectures on the icosahedron (1884 published ), in which he combines geometric, function-theoretic and group- theoretic ideas. The monograph on modular functions of Fricke and Klein also provides brief comments on Galois theory, on the Fricke in his algebra textbook 1924 ( based on Heinrich Weber's Algebra ) comes back. The high regard in which Fricke enjoyed among contemporary mathematicians, shows, among other things on a correspondence with William Burnside, the English pioneer of group theory in which it is to find the first written mention of the Burnside problem.

He was with Oystein Ore and Emmy Noether, the collected works of Richard Dedekind, his predecessor in Braunschweig, out and was planning a biography of Dedekind, but she remained at his death, which no longer even let him see the appearance of the works of Dedekind, unfinished. With H. Vermeil, Erich Bessel -Hagen and Alexander Ostrowski he gave from 1921 to 1923, the collected works of his teacher Felix Klein out.

In 1920 he was president of the German Mathematical Society.