Bernhard Neumann

Bernhard Hermann Neumann ( * October 15, 1909 in Berlin, † 21 October 2002 in Canberra ) was a German - Anglo- Australian mathematician who worked on group theory (especially infinite groups ).

Life and work

Neumann was the son of AEG engineer Richard Neumann and grew up in Berlin. He studied from 1928 at the Albert -Ludwigs- University of Freiburg and the University of Berlin, where Erhard Schmidt, Robert Remak, Isay Schur, Alfred Brauer and Heinz Hopf were among his teachers. In 1932 he was on Schur's request doctorate ( The automorphism groups of free groups). After the seizure of power by the National Socialists, he went to Amsterdam and then to Cambridge, where he was in 1935 again his doctorate under Philip Hall ( Identical relations in groups). After that, he was an unpaid assistant at Cambridge and then from 1937 Assistant Lecturer at the University of Cardiff. In 1939, he briefly went to Germany to bring his ( protestierenden! ) Jewish parents to England. During the Second World War he was briefly interned and then in the British Army, most recently in Berlin in military reconnaissance. In 1946 he was Lecturer in Hull, and from 1948 in Manchester, where he was eventually Reader. In 1961 he was a professor and dean of the Mathematics Department of the Institute of Advanced Studies at the Australian National University in Canberra, where he lived after his retirement in 1974.

In his doctoral thesis at Cambridge, he led a Gruppenvarietäten and examined, inter alia, whether they have a finite basis ( the general case was of a negative decision Olschanskij 1969 ). With his wife, Hanna Neumann and Graham Higman, he proved in 1949 HNN - Einbettungstheorem: Every countable group can be in a group generated by two generators embedded.

Neumann was also interested in the history of mathematics and published essays, inter alia, about Ada Lovelace and her relationship with Charles Babbage and Augustus De Morgan. He played a significant role in the construction of university mathematics and teacher education in Australia. In 1994 he was awarded the Companionship of the Order of Australia.

Neumann was Vice President of the London Mathematical Society from 1957 to 1959, Vice- President of the Australian Mathematical Society from 1966 to 1968 and its president. In 1949 he was awarded the prize of the scientific community of Amsterdam. He won in 1952 the Adams Prize of the University of Cambridge ( for An Essay on free products of groups with amalgamations ), was in 1959 a Fellow of the Royal Society and a member of the Australian Academy of Science (1963). For this he gave 1980/1981 six volumes of Mathematics at work out. To this end, he played passionate cello.

In 1970 he was invited speaker at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Nice ( Properties of countable character).

In 1938 he married the mathematician Hanna Neumann ( 1914-1971, née von Caemmerer ), whom he knew from his student days in Berlin. With her he had three sons and two daughters. After the death of his first wife he married in 1973 Dorothea Frieda Auguste Zeim. Two sons from his first marriage, Peter and Walter Neumann, were also mathematicians.

Writings

  • Lectures on topics in the theory of infinite groups. 1960
  • Selected Works of Bernard and H.M.Neumann. 6 volumes
119058
de