Eduard Stiefel

Ludwig Eduard Stiefel (* April 21, 1909 in Zurich, † November 25, 1978 ) was a Swiss mathematician.

Biography

Eduard Stiefel was born on 21 April 1909 as a son of the famous painter and graphic artist Eduard Stiefel in Zurich. He went through the schools of his native city, and studied from 1927 to 1931 mathematics and physics at the ETH Zurich. He graduated in 1931 with honors and continued his studies in Hamburg and Göttingen continued. In 1935, he received his doctorate at ETH at Heinz Hopf. After a period as a research assistant, he was a lecturer in 1942 and in 1943 full professor at the ETH.

Boots started off working in the topology, including about the topology of Lie groups and fiber bundles. A variety of characteristic classes is named after him (boots -Whitney classes). His classification of fiber bundles on spheres also has application in the classification of algebras (represented by Friedrich Hirzebruch in Heinz -Dieter Ebbinghaus include: numbers). Later he turned to all of numerical mathematics. He headed the Institute was founded in 1948 in Applied Mathematics at the ETH, for which he a Z4 tracked by Konrad Zuse in 1949 in Bavaria, which was rented by Zuse for ETH and put back on track. The ETH was thus on the European continent, the first university with a programmable calculator. Later boots sent his assistant Heinz Rutishauser and Ambros Speiser in the U.S. to study computing machines, from which the ETH own development ERMETH emerged, which until 1963 was from 1955.

Boots also worked on celestial mechanics, especially the calculation of satellite orbits, and generally on perturbation theory. A regularization of him and Paul Kustaanheimo, the spinors and a transformation in four-dimensional space applies, is named after him. Boots received research contracts from the European ESA (or its predecessor ESRO ) and NASA. 1966 to 1970 he was President of the Swiss Committee on Space Research.

Boots, who had edited the lectures of virgin Isay on representation theory in 1936 at the ETH, wrote among other things, a book on group theory and one on descriptive geometry.

In 1952 he developed with Magnus Hestenes the conjugate gradient method in numerical linear algebra.

In 1956 he was president of the Swiss Mathematical Society. 1970 to 1974 he was president of the Society for Applied Mathematics and Mechanics.

He was a member of the Norwegian Academy of Sciences and the Leopoldina and honorary degrees from the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven ( Leuven, 1971), the University of Würzburg (1974) and the University of Braunschweig (1975). In 1968 he was a visiting professor at the University of Brussels. Boots was also colonel of artillery in the Swiss Army.

In 1954 he gave a plenary lecture at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Amsterdam ( Recent developments in relaxation techniques ).

For boots, inter alia, post-doctoral Ambros Speiser, Peter Henrici, Urs Graber and Kirch Fritz -Rudolf Güntsch.

Writings

  • Group Theoretical Methods and their Application, Teubner 1979 English Group theoretical methods and their applications, Birkhäuser 1992
  • With Urs Kirchgraber: methods of analytic perturbation theory and its application, Teubner 1978
  • Introduction to Numerical Mathematics, Teubner, 1976 ( English: Introduction to numerical mathematics, Academic Press 1963)
  • With Hans Rudolf Schwarz: Numerical symmetric matrices, Teubner 1972
  • Textbook of descriptive geometry, Birkhäuser, 1971 ( first 1947)
  • Methods of Mathematical Physics, ETH Publisher 1974, 1982
  • With Heinz Rutishauser: program -controlled digital computing devices, Birkhauser 1951
  • Direction Fields and Teleparallelism in n- dimensional manifolds, Comm. Math Helvetici, Vol 8, 1935/6, Dissertation
  • About direction fields in projective spaces and a set of the real algebra, Comm. Math Helvetici, Vol 13, 1950/51, p.205
  • About a relationship between closed Lie's groups and discontinuous groups of motions of Euclidean spaces and their application to the list of simple Lie's groups, Comm. Math Helvetici 1941/2 ( Classification of simple Lie groups)
  • Crystallographic determination of the characters Liescher groups, Comm. Math Helvetici, Volume 17, 1944/45,
  • About some methods of Relaxationsrechnung, Journal of Applied Mathematics and Physics ( ZAMP ), Volume 3, 1952, p.1 -33
  • Relaxation methods best strategy for solving linear systems of equations, Comm. Math Commentarii Mathematici Helvetici, Volume 29, 1955
  • The Renaissance of celestial mechanics, elements of mathematics in 1964
  • With Paul Kustaanheimo: perturbation method of Kepler motion based on spinor regularization, Journal of Pure and Applied Mathematics 1965
Stiefel–Whitney class Z4 (computer) European Space Agency Issai Schur Peter Henrici (mathematician) Integrated Authority File
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