Reinhold Baer

Reinhold Baer ( born July 22, 1902 in Berlin, † October 22, 1979 in Zurich ) was a German mathematician who is best known for his work on algebra and specifically to the group theory, but also to the geometry.

Life

Baer initially studied mechanical engineering at the Technical University of Hannover, but then switched in 1921 to study mathematics and philosophy in Freiburg im Breisgau ( with Wolfgang Krull and Alfred Loewy ( 1873-1935 ) ) and Göttingen, where he belonged to the circle around Emmy Noether and Hellmuth Kneser on a subject of differential geometry doctorate. Before that, he went in 1924 with a scholarship to Kiel to Helmut Hasse, Ernst Steinitz and Otto Toeplitz. 1926 to 1929 he was an assistant at Loewy in Freiburg, under whose influence he turned to algebra. In 1928 he went to Helmut Hasse in Halle, where he among other things, Steinitz ' classic essay " Algebraic theory of the body " of 1910 ( along with Hasse ) as a book newly published ( with commentaries and an appendix of Baer on Galois theory ). After the seizure of power by the National Socialists in 1933 went Baer (who was a Jew ), who with his wife Marianne Erika Kirstein ( Marriage 1929) just took a holiday in Austria, via Manchester ( at Louis Mordell ) to Princeton, where he was from 1935 to 1937 at the invitation of Hermann Weyl was. In 1938 he accepted a professorship at the University of Illinois at Urbana. In 1956 he went as professor to Frankfurt am Main. He had a large number of students and organized in Germany regularly group theory conferences in Oberwolfach, especially about groups in geometry.

Baer is best known for his work in group theory, where he dealt with inter alia extension problems and finiteness problems, and examined nilpotent and solvable groups. Named after him here are Baer groups, Baer rings and Baer radical of a group. Baer introduced in 1941 the concept of injective module. He turned to the group theory in the theory of finite projective planes. In addition, he was also involved in set theory, field theory and topology.

Since 1963 will take place at each changing German universities Reinhold Baer Colloquia.

PhD by him are, for example, Heinz Lüneburg, Bernd Fischer, Peter Dembowski, Donald G. Higman, Dieter Held, Gerhard O. Michler, Hans Kurzweil, Ingo Weidig (Prof. University of Koblenz -Landau ), Helmut Bender ( Professor in Kiel), Otto cone.

Works

• Extension of groups and their isomorphisms, Math Z. 38 (1934 ), no 1, 375-416
• Linear algebra and projective geometry, Academic Press 1952