Kurt Hirsch

Kurt August Hirsch ( born January 12, 1906 in Berlin, † November 4, 1986 in London) was a British mathematician who worked on group theory.

Hirsch was born in Berlin as the son of the chemical engineer and owner of a soap factory Robert Hirsch ( † 1913). His grandfather was the historian of medicine and temporary Rector of the University of Berlin August Hirsch. 1913 made ​​the company of his father, he was bankrupt and, after his father committed suicide and worsened the financial situation of the family, sent to a school in Frankfurt an der Oder. He studied ( thanks to a scholarship due to the former position of his grandfather at the university ) mathematics and philosophy at the Humboldt University in Berlin, among others, Ludwig Bieberbach, Richard von Mises, Isay Schur and Erhard Schmidt. In 1933 he earned his doctorate under Max Dessoir a topic in the philosophy of mathematics, the dispute between intuitionists and formalists to Brouwer to David Hilbert ( intuition and logical form: For the current philosophy of mathematics ). The examination and the dissertation were in 1930, but deer could be ( partly because he married in 1928 ) until three years later afford to print the dissertation, which was necessary for promotion. Since 1928 he worked as a science journalist for the newspaper Vossische, but continued his mathematical studies.

In 1934, Hirsch, who was with a Jewish woman and even converted to Judaism after marrying again, because of the rise of the Nazis ( which resulted also in 1934 the liberal Vossische newspaper was closed) to England. There he met the mediation of Bernhard Neumann the group theorist Philip Hall, who encouraged him to turn all of mathematics. In 1937 he received his doctorate for a second time at the University of Cambridge in Hall (A class of infinite soluble groups). He was in 1938 a lecturer at the University of Leicester. In 1940 he was imprisoned briefly, because he had not yet had British citizenship. In 1948 he was a professor at King's College in Newcastle upon Tyne, later Newcastle University. There he began the translation of the group theory textbook by Alexander Kurosch from Russian to English, the first volume was published in 1955. In 1951 he became a professor at Queen Mary College, University of London. In 1954/55 he was a visiting professor at the University of Colorado.

He was married in 1928 with Elsa Brühl, with whom he had a son and a daughter. He was a passionate chess player who won several championships in English counties.