Ludwig Bieberbach

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Ludwig Georg Elias Moses Bieberbach (December 4, 1886 – September 1, 1982) was a German mathematician.

[edit] Biography

Born in Goddelau, near Darmstadt, he studied under Felix Klein at Göttingen, receiving his doctorate in 1910. His dissertation was titled On the theory of automorphic functions (German: Zur Theorie der automorphen Funktionen). He wrote a habilitation thesis in 1911 about groups of Euclidean motions that helped prove German mathematician David Hilbert's eighteenth problem. He worked on complex analysis and its applications to other areas in mathematics. He is known for his work on dynamics in several complex variables where he obtained similar results as Fatou, and for the Bieberbach conjecture, which stated a necessary condition on a holomorphic function to map the open unit disk of the complex plane injectively to the complex plane. The statement concerns the Taylor series of such a function. He made this conjecture in 1916 and it was later completely solved by French-American mathematician Louis de Branges in 1984, after which it was called de Branges' theorem. There is also a Bieberbach theorem on space groups. Another important contribution to mathematical research that Bieberbach made was a 1928 book that he coauthored with another mathematician, a German Jew named Issai Schur titled Über die Minkowskische Reduktiontheorie der positiven quadratischen Formen. Ironically, Schur was one of the people who Bieberbach would later persecute during the anti-Semitic campaign in academia in Nazi Germany in the 1930s.

Bieberbach was a speaker at the International Congress of Mathematicians held at Zurich in 1932.

Bieberbach was an active Nazi. He was anti-Semitic and involved in the repression of Jewish colleagues, including Edmund Landau and his former "dear friend" Issai Schur. Bieberbach was heavily influenced by another German mathematician and anti-Semite named Theodore Vahlen, who along with Bieberbach founded the "Deutsche Mathematik" ("German mathematics") movement and the German mathematical journal of the same name. The purpose of the Deutsche Mathematik movement was to encourage and promote a "German" style in mathematics. Bieberbach's and Vahlen's idea of having German mathematics was only part of a wider trend in the scientific community in Nazi Germany towards giving the sciences racial character, there were also pseudoscientific movements for "German physics", "German chemistry", and "German biology". He published a number of anti-Semitic papers. In 1945, Bieberbach was dismissed from all his academic positions because of his support of Nazism, but in 1949 was invited to lecture at the University of Basel by Ostrowski, who considered Bieberbach's anti-Semitic views irrelevant to his contributions to the field of mathematics.