Hellmuth Kneser
Hellmuth Kneser (* April 16, 1898 in Dorpat; † August 23, 1973 in Tübingen ) was a German mathematician.
Life and work
Hellmuth Kneser was the son of the mathematician Adolf Kneser and studied from 1916 at the University of Breslau, where his father had become a professor of mathematics and where he, among other things Lectures of Erhard Schmidt visited. Then he went to Göttingen, where he received his doctorate in 1921 with David Hilbert for studies on quantum theory ( published in Mathematische Annalen Bd.84, 1921). In Göttingen, he was in 1922 for his work on the determination of all regular families of curves on closed surfaces lecturer. In 1925 he became an associate professor of the successor of radon at the University of Greifswald, and in 1937 professor at the University of Tübingen. He supported Wilhelm Süss in mind that the Mathematical Research Institute Oberwolfach could be continued in the Black Forest in 1945. Kneser was 1958-1959 successor sweet as scientific director of the Oberwolfach Institute.
Kneser was a member of the SA and the Nazi Party.
Kneser worked in many areas of mathematics such as topology, group theory, almost periodic functions, differential geometry, iteration of analytic functions, uniformization, the value distribution of meromorphic functions and game theory. He introduced the concept of normal surfaces a ( Wolfgang hook later expanded ), thus demonstrating the existence of a prime decomposition of 3-manifolds (later further developed by John Milnor ) as a connected sum of irreducible manifolds and products of the form.
He was editor of the mathematical journal, Archives of Mathematics and Aequationes Mathematicae, 1954 President of the German Mathematical Society and the Executive Committee of the International Mathematical Union. He was since 1958 a member of the Heidelberg Academy of Sciences and since 1963 the Finnish Academy of Sciences and the Göttingen Academy of Sciences.
His brother Hans Otto Kneser was a physicist. His son Martin Kneser was also a well-known mathematician.
Writings
- Function theory. Studia Mathematica, Göttingen, 1958, 2nd edition 1966.