Edmund Landau
Edmund Georg Hermann Landau ( born February 14, 1877 in Berlin, † February 19, 1938 ) was a German mathematician who has made outstanding contributions to analytic number theory.
Life
Edmund Landau came from an upper middle-class assimilated German - Jewish family. His father Leopold Landau was a gynecologist and understood both as a German patriot and as a Zionist. These views he wore on his son. Landau attended the French Gymnasium in Berlin. Already at school fell on his extraordinary mathematical talent. He studied at the Friedrich Wilhelm University ( now Humboldt University, Berlin ), where he received his doctorate in 1899 with Ferdinand Georg Frobenius on a number theoretical issue. In 1905 he married Marianne Ehrlich, the daughter of Nobel laureate Paul Ehrlich. In 1901 he habilitated in Frobenius and taught until 1908 as a lecturer at the Berlin University.
In 1909 he accepted a call to Göttingen to follow in the footsteps of Hermann Minkowski. Here, he was on equal footing with the senior colleagues David Hilbert and Felix Klein. In 1912 he gave a plenary lecture at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Cambridge ( Solved and unsolved problems in the theory of distribution of primes and the Riemann zeta function).
Landau practiced his Jewish faith ( he added his name Yechezkel later added, after a famous Prague rabbi among his ancestors ) and learned for his speech at the opening of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem 1925 Hebrew. He was in 1927/28 one years visiting professor in Jerusalem. Landau was very involved for the establishment and equipment of the Hebrew University and bequeathed his estate in this his extensive library. He was also very wealthy - when someone asked him the way to his home in Göttingen, he responded that it could not miss it, it was the most beautiful house in the city.
In 1921 he was president of the German Mathematical Society; In the same year he was also elected a member of the Leopoldina. In 1924 he was made an honorary member of the London Mathematical Society.
Landau did not take the threat posed by the Nazis seriously long - when his friend Fritz Rathenau told him ( a cousin of Walter Rathenau ) 1923 of plans for concentration camps for Jews, he said, in that case he would get a room with balcony and view to the south secure. In 1933 he was boycotted by Nazi students (led by Oswald Teichmüller ) and 1934 displaced as a result of the Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service into early retirement. Until his death he taught only sporadically in Brussels and Cambridge.
For Landau's students included Harald Bohr, Dunham Jackson, Paul Bernays, Detlef Cauer, Werner Schmeidler, Adolf Hammerstein, Alexander Ostrowski, Carl Ludwig Siegel, Gustav Doetsch, Erich Kamke, Werner Rogosinski, Arnold Walfisz and Hans Heilbronn.
Personality and scientific work
Landau was considered a very dedicated and good teachers. He was known to provide the highest standards for himself and his students. His books were in a dry laconic style written ( " Landau - style "), which did not lack of humor. Landau was the personification of a "pure " mathematician who had sniffed each applied mathematics from him. Even the geometry was arrested him as too much of the application so that it did not include it in his work area. His main area of work was the analytic number theory. Among other things, he was able to simplify the present proof of the prime number theorem and its generalization to algebraic number fields. Landau's lectures and publications were works of art of mathematically concise and exact evidence ( in the form " set: ... proof: ... set: ... evidence ... "), which left out any form of explanation and illustration for motivation. This was especially true of his Foundations of Analysis. However, this made his listeners and readers in understanding not easy. As Hilbert in 1938 learned of the death of Landau, he should have said in regard to this rigor and exactness: "He was the Pflichttreueste of us all".
His books on number theory, in particular the doctrine of the distribution of primes (1909 ), regarded as standard works.
As a representative of "pure mathematics " Landau was in the Göttingen faculty, however, increasingly isolated, after his colleagues (in particular, Hilbert, Courant, Born) started becoming more interested in the mathematical problems in theoretical physics, especially in quantum physics and relativity.
Landau was not as simple personality. His considerable self-confidence was often perceived by others as arrogance. After he had once get dissertations from the Institute of Ludwig Prandtl, after all, a world-famous flow mechanic and aerodynamicist, in his hand, he called from now on such work, which dealt with matters concerning the application, just ironic and disrespectful as " lubricating oil " and the associated science as " lubricating oil Mathematics".
At the doctoral dissertation of Maria- Pia Geppert, which appeared in the Mathematische Zeitschrift in 1932, he wrote a critical article in the following year, which consists of more than twenty comments on their work. On the other hand, praised Landau non- rigorous proof attempts by other mathematicians and developed them further, such as the works of Ernst Pfeiffer and Adolf Piltz.
Landau problems
At the International Congress of Mathematicians in Cambridge he listed four conjectures in the theory of prime numbers, which at that time were not vulnerable in his opinion (they are still unresolved ) and which are known as Landau - problems:
- Goldbach's Conjecture
- The prime twins conjecture
- The Legendre conjecture
- There are infinitely many primes of the form?