This little book is conceived as a service to mathematicians attending the 1998 International Congress of Mathematicians in Berlin. It presents a comprehensive, condensed overview of mathematical activity in Berlin, from Leibniz almost to the present day (without, however, including biographies of living mathematicians). Since many towering figures in mathematical history worked in Berlin, most of the chapters of this book are concise biographies. These are held together by a few survey articles presenting the overall development of entire periods of scientific life at Berlin. Overlaps between various chapters and differences in style between the chap ters were inevitable, but sometimes this provided opportunities to show different aspects of a single historical event - for instance, the Kronecker-Weierstrass con troversy. The book aims at readability rather than scholarly completeness. There are no footnotes, only references to the individual bibliographies of each chapter. Still, we do hope that the texts brought together here, and written by the various authors for this volume, constitute a solid introduction to the history of Berlin mathematics.
Author(s): Eberhard Knobloch (auth.), Prof. Heinrich Begehr, Helmut Koch, Jürg Kramer, Norbert Schappacher, Ernst-Jochen Thiele (eds.)
Edition: 1
Publisher: Birkhäuser Basel
Year: 1998
Language: English
Pages: 216
Tags: Mathematics, general
Front Matter....Pages i-xi
Mathematics at the Prussian Academy of Sciences 1700–1810....Pages 1-8
Mathematics in Berlin, 1810–1933....Pages 9-26
Augustus Leopold Crelle, 1780–1855....Pages 27-32
Gustav Peter Lejeune Dirichlet....Pages 33-39
Carl Gustav Jacob Jacobi....Pages 41-48
Jacob Steiner and Synthetic Geometry....Pages 49-54
Gotthold Eisenstein....Pages 55-60
Kummer and Kronecker....Pages 61-69
Weierstrass and some members of his circle: Kovalevskaia, Fuchs, Schwarz, Schottky....Pages 71-82
Frobenius, Schur, and the Berlin Algebraic Tradition....Pages 83-96
Erhard Schmidt, John von Neumann....Pages 97-104
Constantin Carathéodory (1873–1950)....Pages 105-109
Richard von Mises....Pages 111-116
Einstein in Berlin....Pages 117-125
The Nazi era: the Berlin way of politicizing mathematics....Pages 127-136
The University of Berlin from Reopening until 1953....Pages 137-141
Helmut Hasse, Hermann Ludwig Schmid and their students in Berlin....Pages 143-149
Freie Universität Berlin....Pages 151-160
Mathematics at the Berlin Technische Hochschule/Technische Universität....Pages 161-167
Mathematics in Berlin at the Humboldt University: from 1953 until now....Pages 169-176
The Mathematical Institute of the Academy of Sciences of the GDR....Pages 177-181
Fast Algorithms, Fast Computers: The Konrad-Zuse-Zentrum Berlin (ZIB)....Pages 183-184
Weierstrass Institute for Applied Analysis and Stochastics (WIAS)....Pages 185-187
Zentralblatt für Mathematik und ihre Grenzgebiete....Pages 189-190
Back Matter....Pages 191-203
