Hans Heilbronn

Hans Arnold Heilbronn ( born October 8, 1908 in Berlin, † April 28, 1975 in Toronto ) was a German-born British- Canadian number theorist.

Life and work

Heilbronn studied in Berlin, Freiburg and Göttingen and received his PhD in 1931 with Edmund Landau with an improvement of a set of Guido Hoheisel on gaps between primes. As a Jew, he fled Germany in 1933 to England, where he finally found a job at the University of Bristol via intermediate stations at Cambridge and Manchester.

Here he proved by methods of analytic number theory that the class number of imaginary quadratic number fields with d tends to infinity. He also proved together with Edward Linfoot that there are more than 10 such number fields with class number 1 ( nine were known since Gauss ), an important advance in the coming of Carl Friedrich Gauss problem of determining all such number fields in due class number. Following this work, he received an invitation from Louis Mordell to Manchester and a year later ( under the influence of Godfrey Harold Hardy ) a scholarship to Trinity College, Cambridge University, where he worked with Harold Davenport, whom he knew from Göttingen, improvements the Hardy - Littlewood circle method worked. He also worked on the Waring problem, number fields with Euclidean algorithm and proved that the Riemann Hypothesis is not true for the zeta function of Epstein. During World War II he was briefly interned and then in the British army during the military intelligence. In 1946 he went to Bristol, where he became in 1949 a professor and dean of the faculty. In 1964 he moved to the United States, beginning at the invitation of Olga Taussky - Todd to the California Institute of Technology. 1964 to 1975 he was professor at the University of Toronto. In 1970 he took Canadian citizenship. He died during a heart pacemaker surgery.

Heilbronn in 1951 a Fellow of the Royal Society in London. From 1959 to 1961 he was President of the London Mathematical Society.

Among his students count the Indians Sarvadaman Chowla and Albrecht Fröhlich.

Writings

  • Collected Papers, 1988
  • On the class number of imaginary quadratic fields, Quarterly Journal of Mathematics vol.5, 1934, pp. 150-160
  • With Linfoot: On the imaginary quadratic corpora of class number one, Quarterly Journal of Mathematics, vol.5, 1934, p.293 -301
G. H. Hardy University of Cambridge Trigonometric polynomial Paul Epstein Integrated Authority File
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