Martin Kneser

Martin Kneser (* January 21, 1928, † 16 February 2004 in Göttingen ) was a German mathematician who dealt with algebra (specifically, quadratic forms ).

Life and work

Martin Kneser was the son of the mathematician Hellmuth Kneser and grandson of Adolf Kneser. He studied from 1945 in Tübingen, Göttingen and Berlin, and in 1950 received his doctorate at the Humboldt University in Berlin with Erhard Schmidt with the dissertation over the edge of parallel bodies. 1951 was Kneser assistant at the University of Münster ( Martin Eichler ) and then in Heidelberg, where he received his habilitation. From 1 April to 31 December 1958, he served as associate professor of mathematics at the University of Saarland in Saarbrücken. From 1959 he was a professor in Munich and from 1963 to 1993 in Göttingen. He worked mainly on the theory of quadratic forms and algebraic groups. In addition, he also engaged in graph theory ( the Kneser graph, which he examined in 1955, are named after him ) and simplified the fundamental theorem of algebra. Named after him Kneser conjecture led to the development of topological combinatorics. They can be formulated as a conjecture on the chromatic number of so-called Kneser graphs and was proved in 1978 by Laszlo Lovasz.

In 1997, Martin Kneser the Karl Georg Christian von Staudt Prize for his contributions to the theory of quadratic forms.

His doctoral include H.-V. Niemeier, Albrecht Pfister, Norbert Schappacher, Ulrich Stuhler and Herbert Lange.

Writings

• Martin Kneser, Rudolf Scharlau: Quadratic Forms, Springer Verlag, 2002, ISBN 3-540-64650-7 (lectures by Kneser in the 1970s and 1980s in Göttingen, re-issued by Scharlau )