Wilhelm Magnus

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Wilhelm Magnus (February 5, 1907, Berlin, Germany – October 15, 1990) was a mathematician. He made important contributions to combinatorial group theory, elliptic functions, and the study of tessellations.

In 1931, he received his PhD from the University of Frankfurt, in Germany. His thesis, written under the direction of Max Dehn, was entitled Über Unendlich diskontinuierliche Gruppen von einer definirenden Relation (der Freiheitssatz).

Magnus was a faculty member in Frankfurt from 1933 until 1938. He refused to join the Nazi Party and, as a consequence, was not allowed to hold an academic post during World War II. In 1947 he became a professor at the University of Göttingen. In 1950, he immigrated to the United States, where he was appointed professor at the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences, at New York University. He stayed there till 1973, when he moved to the Polytechnic Institute of New York, before retiring in 1978.

[edit] References

Wilhelm Magnus, Abraham Karrass, Donald Solitar, Combinatorial group theory. Presentations of groups in terms of generators and relations, Reprint of the 1976 second edition, Dover Publications, Inc., Mineola, NY, 2004. ISBN 0-486-43830-9