Hans Schwerdtfeger

Hans Wilhelm Eduard Schwerdtfeger ( born December 9, 1902 in Göttingen, † June 29, 1990 in Adelaide ) was a German - Australian- Canadian mathematician.

Schwerdtfeger was the son of a Prussian major, who fell in 1914 at the beginning of the First World War. Schwerdtfeger went to high school in Göttingen, interrupted in the period after the First World War, when he worked for financial reasons at the Siemens - Schuckert in Berlin. He studied at Göttingen and at the University of Bonn, where he received his doctorate in 1935 with Otto Toeplitz with the thesis " Contributions to Matrices - calculus and the theory of group matrix ". As an opponent of the Nazis in 1936, he went with his family to Prague, 1939 Zurich and France to Australia. In 1940 he was a lecturer at the University of Adelaide and later Senior Lecturer at the University of Melbourne. In 1957 he was associate professor at McGill University in Montreal, where he received a full professorship in 1960. In 1983 he retired there and went back to Australia as a visiting scientist at the University of Adelaide. Also his son, Peter Schwerdtfeger, a professor of meteorology lived at Flinders University in Adelaide.

Schwerdtfeger dealt with Galois theory, group theory with applications in geometry, matrix theory and function theory.

He was married since 1935 to the mathematician Hanna Maeder, who was his fellow student in Göttingen.

In 1964 he became a member of the Royal Society of Canada. In 1979 he was editor of the Collected Works of Gustav Herglotz.

Writings

• Introduction to linear algebra and the theory of matrices, Groningen, Noordhoff 1950
• Geometry of complex numbers: Circle Geometry, Moebius Transformation, Non- Euclidean Geometry, University of Toronto Press 1962
• Introduction to Group Theory, Leiden, Noordhoff International Publishing 1976
• Les fonctions of matrices, Hermann, Paris 1938