Kurt Reidemeister

Kurt Werner Friedrich Reidemeister ( born October 13, 1893 in Braunschweig, † July 8, 1971 in Göttingen ) was a German mathematician and professor at the Universities of Vienna, Königsberg, Marburg and Göttingen. He developed the Reidemeister moves, a cornerstone of knot theory, of a part of the topology with current applications (among others) in the polymer physics. He also dealt with philosophy, democratic accountability of academics and emerged as a translator of Stéphane Mallarmé; own poems were published in 1947.

Life and work

Kurt Reidemeister, was born in Brunswick, the son of Hans and his wife Sophie Reidemeister, called Langerfeldt. His father was the Duke of Braunschweigischer Government. 1912 Reidemeister began studying philosophy and mathematics in Freiburg im Breisgau, where he visited among other lectures of Edmund Husserl. He subsequently moved to Marburg and then to Göttingen to continue his studies, however, interrupted to report in 1914 as a volunteer. 1914-18 he was a soldier in World War II and was able to finish his studies so until 1920. His state examination he passed in the subjects of mathematics, physics, chemistry, philosophy, and geology. In mathematics he was rigorously tested by Edmund Landau. Then Reidemeister went to Erich Hecke to Hamburg to take up an assistant position to accept. When hedge he received his doctorate in 1921 with a thesis in algebraic number theory. Already in Hamburg showed Reidemeister's versatile range of interests. It dealt not only with mathematical questions but also took active part in the social and cultural life, among other things, he wrote regularly literary columns in a Hamburg newspaper and wrote poems and small stories.

In 1922 he accepted an appointment as an associate professor at the University of Vienna. There he came across Hans Hahn in contact with the ideas of the Vienna Circle. In his time in Vienna Reidemeister came to the decision to deal intensively with the knot theory. Main work area in the following years was the combinatorial topology. In Vienna, he also met his future wife, Elisabeth Wagner, a native of Riga, know. Followed in 1925 Reidemeister a call to the Albertina to Königsberg as successor to Wilhelm Franz Meyer. In the Königsberg time he continued his work begun in Vienna for topology and knot theory. In 1926 he proved that two nodes if and diagrams define the same node, if it can be converted by a sequence of Reidemeister moves together.

Reidemeister's philosophical interests were again expressed, as of September 1930, at the same time took place four major scientific meetings in Königsberg: the Annual Meeting of the Society of German Natural Scientists and Physicians, the annual meeting of the German Mathematical Society, the 6th German physicist and mathematician session and the second session for epistemology of the exact sciences. Reidemeister was involved in the organization of these conferences and had invited many members of the Vienna Circle. At these sessions, David Hilbert gave his famous radio speech ( " We need to know - we will know " ) and Kurt Gödel presented - at that time little attention - his results on undecidable sentences in formal logical systems.

The Konigsberg students (as well as the student body at almost all other German universities ) came with the end of the 1920s, increasingly in the wake of the anti-republican political rights and the Nazis. As early as 1930 there had been student unrest that led to the resignation of the rector. Reidemeister felt repelled by the agitational irrational thought and action and referred in his lectures a position against it. With the rise of the Nazis in 1933, he was subsequently released, although he was unlike his Konigsberg Mathematicians colleague, Professor Gabor Szego and the two lecturers Werner Wolfgang Rogosinski and Richard Brauer of non-Jewish origin. The expulsion Reidemeister out of office in the spring of 1933 " was ... the case of intellectuals, became the ideal of the, exact thinking '... with the fascist developments of academic life in conflict and remained irreconcilable. " ( Epple )

While the three gentlemen mentioned, which were also released shortly after Reidemeister had to emigrate from Germany, Reidemeister could probably gain much by switching Erich Hecke, the opposite was also Nazism adverse, employment in Marburg. There he continued to work in the field of topology, retired to the period of National Socialism, however, increasingly into inner emigration back.

In 1935, he defined a today known as the Reidemeister torsion topological invariant, with which one could distinguish homotopy equivalent non- homeomorphic manifolds for the first time. Specifically, he proved that the lens spaces L (7,1 ) and L (7,2 ) are not homeomorphic. Further, going back to Reidemeister results are the classification of the fundamental group occurring from 3-manifolds abelian groups and the set of Reidemeister -Singer: the two Heegaard decompositions of 3-manifold have a common stabilization.

In 1946 he was president of the German Mathematical Society.

He moved in 1955 to Göttingen, where he died in 1971.

His PhD was Heiner Zieschang.

Publications (selection)

• Knot theory. Results of mathematics and its applications, Volume 1 Springer, Berlin 1932
• Introduction to combinatorial topology. Vieweg, Braunschweig 1932
• The arithmetic of the Greeks. Leipzig- Berlin 1940 ( discussed by Max plug- in Mental work No. 2, Year 1941).
• Mathematics and logic in Plato. Leipzig- Berlin, 1942.
• Complexes and homotopy chains. Bulletin of the American Mathematical Society 56, 297-307 (1950).