Otto Blumenthal
Ludwig Otto Blumenthal ( born July 20, 1876 in Frankfurt am Main, † November 13, 1944 in ghetto Theresienstadt ) was a German mathematician.
Life
He grew up in Frankfurt and was a student of the Goethe -Gymnasium. At the age of 18, influenced by a friend, he converted from Judaism to the Protestant faith.
After studying mathematics and the natural sciences in Göttingen, where he attended lectures by Sommerfeld, Schoenflies, Hilbert and Klein, and Munich from 1894 to 1898 Blumenthal was the first doctoral student of David Hilbert. The title of his dissertation was on the development of an arbitrary function by the denominators of a Stieltjes continued fraction. From 1899 to 1900 he studied with Émile Borel and Camille Jordan in Paris. In 1901 Blumenthal habilitation in Göttingen with the topic About modular functions of several variables.
By the year 1905 he was a lecturer at Göttingen and took a short time a Visiting professor at the University of Marburg true. In October 1905 Blumenthal was appointed to a chair at the RWTH Aachen.
His mathematical main interest was initially in the application of the theory of complex functions in number theory. Goal of his research on modular forms was to find features that algebraic number fields could be constructed ( Kronecker's childhood dream, the Twelfth of Hilbert's problems). Named after him are the Hilbert -Blumenthal surfaces and the Hilbert -Blumenthal modular forms. Blumenthal was a close associate of Hilbert and also wrote his biography in the collected works of Hilbert. Blumenthal also dealt with the theory of entire functions, in particular those of infinite order, and published here in 1910 on a book (in French). He also wrote several contributions to applied mathematics. His contributions to spherical functions, see for example Application in communications technology. He also studied stresses in aircraft wings, vibration of membranes, etc.
From 1906 to 1938 he was managing editor of Mathematische Annalen. In 1924 he was chairman of the German Mathematical Society (DMV) and from 1925 to 1933 he edited the annual report of the DMV. Blumenthal spoke eight languages and had many international contacts, including with Soviet mathematicians. In 1923, Blumenthal was elected a member of the Scholars Academy Leopoldina.
Already in the spring of 1933, now also began at RWTH Aachen Denunziationsmaßnahmen the student body. Here were the ASTA (General Student Committee ) and the student leaders the Denunziationsausschuss this extra- employed consisting of Hermann Bonin, Hubert Hoffmann, Felix Rötscher, Adolf Wallichs, and Robert Hans Wentzel get over it releases, which were or supposedly the lecturers and professors of non-Aryan descent or actually had an undesirable political setting. Blumenthal should now according to the Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service due to his Jewish background and his membership in unpopular organizations such as the German League for Human Rights, together with the other non-Aryan professors Arthur Guttmann, Walter Maximilian Fuchs, Ludwig Hopf, Theodore von Kármán, Paul Ernst Levy, the teaching license be revoked Karl Walter Mautner, Alfred Meusel, Leopold Karl Pick, Rudolf Ruer, Hermann Salmang and Ludwig Strauss from September 1933. A pleas for his acting rector Paul X to the Reich Commissioner in the Ministry of Education, Bernhard Rust, to be able to hold it still did not lead to positive results. Since Blumenthal's grandparents were Jewish faith, he was regarded by the Nazis despite his conversion to Protestantism because of the Nuremberg Laws as a "full Jew ". At first he was on leave in May 1933 from its place and then dismissed for political reasons on 22 September 1933 shortly after his remuneration are set. His dismissal was allegedly not for "racial " reasons, but because of his membership of the pacifist associations.
He lectured widely at home and abroad, but could not find a permanent job. 1938 was finally granted to him in Germany a complete ban on working and he had to give up, " Mathematische Annalen " his 30 -year tenure as managing editor of. In July 1939, he emigrated with his wife Mali in the Netherlands and lived in Utrecht. Here they were friends with a number of other German - Jewish emigrants, including with historian Hedwig Hintze. After the couple was spared by the intervention of a pastor of the deportation in August 1942, they were both initially, then deported in April 1943 in the concentration camp Hertogenbosch in the Westerbork transit camp. His wife died in May 1943 in Westerbork, he came in January 1944 in the Theresienstadt ghetto and died there in November of pneumonia.
Honors
- In the main building of RWTH Aachen is a memorial plaque on the fate of Otto Blumenthal
- In Aachen and Duke Rath ( Aachen region ) the streets are named after him.