Paul Wolfskehl
Paul Friedrich Wolfskehl (* June 30, 1856 in Darmstadt, † September 13, 1906 ) was a German physician and mathematician, known as the founder of the Wolfskehl price.
Life
Wolfskehl was the youngest of two sons of a Jewish banker Joseph Carl Theodor Wolfskehl (1814-1863) and Johanna Wolfskehl, daughter of the Stuttgart court bankers Nathan Wolf Kaula. While his older brother, the lawyer Otto Wolfskehl (1841-1907), who took over his father's bank ( the total of about 1800 to 1881 was ), studied Wolfskehl 1875 medicine in Leipzig, Tübingen and Heidelberg, where he received his doctorate in 1880 on ophthalmology. Around the same time, showed the first symptoms of multiple sclerosis. Wolfskehl decided to abandon the medical profession, and began to study mathematics in Bonn and from 1881 at the Friedrich Wilhelm University in Berlin, where he heard, among other number theory at Ernst Eduard Kummer. Wolfskehl, who was already holding a doctorate in medicine, but wrote no mathematical dissertation. In 1887 he habilitated allegedly at the TH Darmstadt, where he also lectured on number theory. However, this is already therefore hardly conceivable because the university until 1899 had no right to award doctorates. The invitation to lecture, was possibly a thanksgiving the university to the family Wolfskehl who had done much for the university. In 1890 he was paralyzed due to his illness and was unable to continue his lectures, but further published a few short mathematical work. In 1903, he agreed to an arranged marriage by the family, but the marriage was unhappy. In 1905, he donated 100,000 gold marks, which he handed over the management of the Göttingen Academy of Sciences, as a prize for those who proved Fermat 's conjecture. Officially, the price in 1908 was proclaimed by the Academy. Allegedly Wolfskehl then had floundered during his studies and to the solution of Fermat 's conjecture, which was also the starting point of the investigations to cyclotomic bodies of his teacher grief that made significant progress in Fermatproblem.
The Wolfskehl Prize in 1997, ten years before its expiry, awarded to Andrew Wiles ( and was still worth DM 75,000 at the time).
The author and translator Charles Wolfskehl was the son of Paul Wolfskehl brother Otto, so his nephew.