Kurt Heegner

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Kurt Heegner (1893–1965) was a German high school teacher and radio engineer from Berlin now famous for his mathematical discoveries.

In 1952 Heegner published what he claimed was the solution of a classic problem proposed by the great mathematician Gauss, the class number 1 problem, a significant and longstanding problem in number theory. Heegner's work was not accepted for years, due mainly to mistakes in the paper, though Harold Stark later showed these could be fixed. Heegner's proof was finally accepted as essentially correct in 1967 when Stark independently arrived at a similar proof, which he then showed was more or less equivalent to Heegner's.

[edit] See also

• List of amateur mathematicians
• Stark-Heegner theorem
• Heegner point

[edit] Literature

• Heegner, Kurt (1952). "Diophantische Analysis und Modulfunktionen", Mathematische Zeitschrift, 56: 227-253.