Friedrich Hirzebruch | |
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 Hirzebruch in 1980 (picture courtesy MFO) | |
| Born | Friedrich Ernst Peter Hirzebruch (1927-10-17)17 October 1927 Hamm,Province of Westphalia, Germany |
| Died | 27 May 2012(2012-05-27) (aged 84) Bonn, Germany |
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| Fields | Mathematics |
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Friedrich Ernst Peter HirzebruchForMemRS[1] (17 October 1927 – 27 May 2012) was a German mathematician, working in the fields oftopology,complex manifolds andalgebraic geometry, and a leading figure in his generation. He has been described as "the most important mathematician in Germany of the postwar period."[3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11]
Hirzebruch was born inHamm,Westphalia in 1927.[12] His father, of the same name, was a maths teacher.
In March 1945, Hirzebruch became a soldier, and in April, in the last weeks of Hitler's rule, he was taken prisoner by the British forces then invading Germany from the west. When a British soldier found that he was studying mathematics, he drove him home, released him, and told him to continue studying.[13] Hirzebruch studied at theUniversity of Münster from 1945 to 1950, with one year atETH Zürich.
Hirzebruch then held a position atErlangen, followed by the years 1952–54 at theInstitute for Advanced Study inPrinceton, New Jersey. After one year atPrinceton University 1955–56, he was made a professor at theUniversity of Bonn, where he remained, becoming director of theMax-Planck-Institut für Mathematik in 1981.More than 300 people gathered in celebration of his 80th birthday in Bonn in 2007.[citation needed]
TheHirzebruch–Riemann–Roch theorem (1954) forcomplex manifolds was a major advance and quickly became part of the mainstream developments around the classicalRiemann–Roch theorem; it was also a precursor of theAtiyah–Singer index theorem andGrothendieck's powerful generalisation. Hirzebruch's bookNeue topologische Methoden in der algebraischen Geometrie (1956) was a basic text for the 'new methods' ofsheaf theory, incomplex algebraic geometry. He went on to write the foundational papers ontopological K-theory withMichael Atiyah, and collaborated withArmand Borel on the theory ofcharacteristic classes. In his later work, he provided a detailed theory ofHilbert modular surfaces, withDon Zagier. He even found connections between theDedekind sum innumber theory anddifferential topology, one of the many discoveries found between these different fields. His work influenced a generation of prominent mathematicians likeKunihiko Kodaira,John Milnor, Borel, Atiyah,Raoul Bott andJean-Pierre Serre.[citation needed]
Hirzebruch is famous for organizing theMathematische Arbeitstagung ("working meetings" in German) inBonn University, beginning in 1957, and the first speakers include Atiyah,Jacques Tits,Alexander Grothendieck,Hans Grauert,Nicolaas Kuiper, and Hirzebruch himself. It allowed international cooperation in the mathematical world for the last 60 years and was a major source of developments intopology,geometry,group theory,number theory as well asmathematical physics in a few decades' time. He also established theMax Planck Institute for Mathematics at Bonn in 1980. The institute became the place for the Arbeitstagung and Hirzebruch was its director until 1995. The second Arbeitstagung began in 1993 and continues to this day.[citation needed]
From 1970 to 1971 he was theDonegall Lecturer in Mathematics atTrinity College Dublin.[citation needed]
According to theMathematics Genealogy Project, Hirzebruch has supervised the doctoral studies of 52 mathematicians. Some of them includeEgbert Brieskorn,Matthias Kreck,Don Zagier,Detlef Gromoll, Klaus Jänich,Lothar Göttsche, Dietmar Arlt,Winfried Scharlau, Walter Neumann, Wolfgang Meyer, Kang Zuo, Hans Scheerer, Erich Ossa, Klaus Lamotke, Eduardo Mendoza, Dimitrios Dais andFriedhelm Waldhausen.[citation needed]
Hirzebruch died at the age of 84 on 27 May 2012.[14][15][16]
Amongst many other honours, Hirzebruch was awarded theWolf Prize in Mathematics in 1988 and aLobachevsky Medal in 1989.[17]
The government of Japan awarded him theOrder of the Sacred Treasure in 1996 and the Seki-Takakazu prize of the Mathematical Society of Japan (MSJ) in 1997.[18]
Hirzebruch won anEinstein Medal of the Albert Einstein Society in Bern in 1999, and received theCantor medal in 2004.
Hirzebruch was a foreign member of numerous academies and societies, including theUnited States National Academy of Sciences, theRussian Academy of Sciences, theRoyal Society[1] and theFrench Academy of Sciences. In 1980–81 he delivered the firstSackler Distinguished Lecture in Israel. He was also a member of academies of Russia, Poland, Ukraine, Israel, Finland, Hungary, Netherlands,Göttingen, Austria, and Ireland as well as theAcademia Europaea and the European Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Hirzebruch was the president of theGerman Mathematical Society in 1962 and 1990, first after the foundation of a separate Eastern German mathematical due to the German division, and then again after the collapse of the wall which led to the unification of the East and West German Mathematical societies. He was also the first President of theEuropean Mathematical Society from 1990 to 1994. In this way, he rebuilt the mathematical life in both Germany and Europe after the war.
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