Erhard Schmidt

Erhard Schmidt (. * 1 Januarjul / January 13 1876greg in Dorpat (now Tartu, Estonia); . † December 6, 1959 in Berlin) was a German mathematician who worked in the functional analysis mainly.

Life

Schmidt was the son of the professor of physiology at Dorpat Alexander Schmidt, who made ​​significant work to explain the coagulation of blood. He studied after visiting the high schools in Tartu and Riga, first at Dorpat and then in Berlin mathematics at Hermann Amandus Schwarz and in Göttingen under David Hilbert, where he in 1905 with a thesis on integral equations doctorate ( development of arbitrary functions for systems mandatory). Hilbert was looking through his program of development of the foundations of what is now called functional analysis, and Schmidt was in one of his most important allies. In 1906 he qualified as a professor in Bonn with Eduard Study, and then went on stations as a professor in Zurich (1908 ), Erlangen and Breslau to Berlin, where he was in 1917 Successor of black. With the soon appointed Ludwig Bieberbach and Isay Schur Management and the instigation Schmidt Department of Applied Mathematics, which was occupied by Richard von Mises, Berlin was formed in the 1920s, one of the centers of attraction for Mathematics in Germany. 1929-1930 he was rector of the University of Berlin. But he was not only a good organizer, but a successful and rousing teachers, such as Heinz Hopf testifies, who heard him in 1917 in Breslau and Berlin, studied with him later. In 1950 he retired, but remained until 1958 Director of the Research Institute of Mathematics of the National Academy of Sciences in Berlin. He was one of the founders of two important German journals: Mathematical Journal (1918 ) and Mathematical News (1948 ).

In the years 1927 and 1928 and again from 1935 to 1936 he was president of the German Mathematical Society in 1936 and Head of the German delegation to the International Congress of Mathematicians in Oslo. Since 1918 he was a member of the Prussian Academy of Sciences, 1942, he was elected a corresponding member of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences.

Schmidt is regarded as one of the founders of functional analysis, many of the concepts in the theory of Hilbert spaces that emerged from the study of integral equations in the Hilbert school, come from him. It simplifies the representations in Hilbert and Ivar Fredholm essential and treated and non-linear integral equations. It is known that Gram -Schmidt orthonormalization method for the development of a orthonormal system of eigenfunctions. In the Rendicondi di Circolo Math.di Palermo from 1908 he treated the Resolution infinite dimensional linear systems in its different aspects. With the reformulation of the theory in the hands of his disciple John von Neumann Schmidt could never get used.

Schmidt also worked in analytic number theory, topology ( new simple proof of the Jordan curve theorem, Proceedings of Preuss.Akad.Wiss. 1923) and finally from 1939 on the isoperimetric problems in geometry. In early work he dealt with the definition of the content and concepts of the curve length in the analysis.

He was married since 1909 with Berta von Bergmann, who died at the birth of his third son in 1916.