Kurt Mahler

Kurt Mahler ( born July 26, 1903 in Krefeld, † February 25, 1988 in Canberra, Australia ) was a German-born British mathematician who worked primarily with number theory ( theory of p- adic numbers).

Life and work

At the age of 5 years ill Kurt Mahler tuberculosis. Because of health problems - he had to be repeatedly operated on and had henceforth a stiff leg - he left the age of thirteen to school to be trained as a toolmaker. In addition, he taught himself the mathematical foundations in the areas of analysis, analytic geometry and trigonometry at by reading works by important mathematician Edmund Landau, David Hilbert and Felix Klein. He hoped to study at a technical university using his training and mathematical knowledge.

However, Mahler's father had secretly little mathematical articles that wrote Mahler, to the local school principal, a mathematician passed. This she sent on Klein, with whom he had once studied, which in turn transmitted it to Carl Ludwig Siegel. So Mahler was able to enroll due to seal intercession in 1923 at the University of Frankfurt for Mathematics, where he among other things, heard of Max Dehn, Ernst Hellinger, Siegel and Otto Szasz. In 1925 he moved to Göttingen, where he attended lectures by Emmy Noether, Richard Courant, Edmund Landau, Max Born, David Hilbert, Alexander Markovich Ostrowski, Werner Heisenberg and Vienna as an unpaid assistant for Norbert worked. His doctoral thesis on zeros of the gamma function, dedicated to the headmaster, he published in 1927 in Frankfurt.

In 1933 he was called to Königsberg, but was forced to emigrate because of his Jewish origin and was 1933/34, to Manchester at Louis Mordell. A year later he went to Groningen, where a bicycle accident in 1936 his old knee suffering caused again and he moved on, therefore, to rest in Switzerland. In 1937 he returned to Manchester, but was in 1940 three months interned as an "enemy alien " on the Isle of Man.

After his return to Manchester Mahler got 1941 as an assistant in 1944 he became a lecturer. In 1946 he became a British citizen, a year later he received his first personal chair professor of the university. In 1948, the Royal Society Mahler on. Mahler remained until 1963 in Manchester, before he accepted a professorship at the Australian National University in Canberra. In 1968 he left Australia to teach at Ohio State University in Columbus (Ohio ) as a professor of mathematics. In 1972 he went into retirement and returned to Australia.

Mahler showed in 1946 that the number 0.1234567891011 .. that arises from the juxtaposition of the decimal digits of all natural numbers, is transcendent. His main area of ​​work were the p- adic numbers, Diophantine approximations, the geometry of numbers and dimensions in the space of polynomials. From his classification of transcendental numbers comes in S, T, U classes ( each of which is algebraically independent ), where Mahler proved that almost all real numbers, the S - class (an example is the Euler number e).

According to him, the Mahler volume in the convex geometry is named ( an invariant under linear transformations of volume defined for centrally symmetric convex bodies in Euclidean space ) and the unresolved conjecture of Mahler says that it is minimal in a hypercube.

One of his students is on the Alf van der Poorten.

Awards

Otto Szász Columbus (Ohio) Cambridge (Massachusetts) Jurjen Ferdinand Koksma Liouville number Integrated Authority File
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