Herman Müntz

Chaim Muntz ( born August 28, 1884 in Lodz, † April 17, 1956 in Sweden, also Herman Müntz, originally Minc ) was a Polish- German mathematician who worked on Analysis and minimal surfaces.

Life

Muntz was born into a secular Jewish family in Lodz in what was then Russian Poland (Congress Poland). He studied from 1902 at the University of Berlin (including with Hermann Amandus Schwarz, Friedrich Schottky, Ferdinand Georg Frobenius, garlic, Edmund Landau ), and in 1910 there in black ( and Schottky ) " magna cum laude" doctorate (For boundary value problem of partial differential equation of the minimal surfaces ). In 1911 he went to Munich ( Aurel Voss, Alfred Pringsheim, Ferdinand von Lindemann ), where, however, from his Habilitation (as well as later) despite intercession of some of his teachers was nothing. He was from 1914 teacher at various schools reform (1914 at the Odenwald School in Heppenheim, 1915 on the Dürer School in Hochwaldhausen, then on its own Schülerpensionat in Heppenheim ).

In 1919, he became a German citizen. After a nervous breakdown, he moved in 1920 briefly returned to Poland, where his wife's parents were farmers. In 1921 he moved to Göttingen. He translated, gave private lessons and wrote scientific papers and reviews for the "Year Book of the progress of mathematics ." From 1924 he was in Berlin, where he also few months the assistant of Albert Einstein was from 1927 ( as the same Cornelius Lanczos ). His efforts to find a university place but were impeded by the fact he was not qualified as a professor. In 1929 he moved to Leningrad, where he had a post at the university where he was teaching, administrative tasks took and edited Lyapunov classic book about the balance of dynamic systems. He received it in Leningrad the equivalent of a habilitation and acted at the University as a professor.

In 1932 he was in the Soviet delegation at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Zurich ( with his friend Chebotaryov, Pavel Alexandrov and communist ideologues Kolman ). In 1937 he was expelled (in the context of a political purge ) from the Soviet Union and went on Tallinn in 1938 to Sweden, where he became a Swedish citizen in 1953. He earned his living by private tutoring. Once in Leningrad he had eye problems, he went blind in his last years. His wife, who in Leningrad had a brain haemorrhage, died already in 1949.

Work

In 1914 he proved a conjecture of Sergei Bernstein ( 1912) on the approximation of continuous functions by exponential functions with a positive sequence of exponents, the reciprocal of the sum diverges ( another proof was Otto Szász ) ( set of Müntz ). The well-known approximation theorem of Weierstrass concerned only general approximation by polynomials. Muntz is known for important work on the Plateau problem ( existence of a minimal surface to a given edge ). His work has been criticized by Tibor Rado, and the solution is the independent work of Jesse Douglas and Tibor Rado attributed (for which Douglas received the first Fields Medal ) 1930. Further work by Müntz related heat conduction problems, projective geometry and axioms of geometry, geometry of numbers, integral equations (1934 appeared a textbook by him in Russia on integral equations ), iteration methods for the determination of the eigenvalues ​​of matrices (even before Richard von Mises ) and partial differential equations.

Muntz had broad intellectual interests (particularly influenced by Goethe and Nietzsche), was correspondent of Martin Buber ( the 1916 also lived in Heppenheim ) and also wrote on issues of Judaism. In 1907 he published a book We Jews in Berlin (Nietzsche dedicated ). He takes it as a secular, socialist Zionist point of view. He wrote articles in the newspaper of Buber " The Jew ".

Writings

• Chaim Müntz: On boundary value problem of partial differential equation of minimal surfaces. Thesis.
• Chaim Müntz: The solution of the Plateau 's problem over convex regions. in: Mathematische Annalen. Berlin 94.1925, p.53. ISSN 0025-5831 Tibor Radó: Remarks on the work of Ch H. Muntz on the Plateausche problem. Review. in: Mathematische Annalen. Berlin 96.1927. ISSN 0025-5831
• Chaim Müntz: to Plateau 's problem - response to the above note of the Lord Radó. in: Mathematische Annalen. Berlin 96.1927. ISSN 0025-5831