◀ ▲ ▶History / 19th-century / Person: Reidemeister, Kurt Werner Friedrich
Person: Reidemeister, Kurt Werner Friedrich
Kurt Reidemeister was a pioneer of knot theory and his work had a great influence on group theory.
Mathematical Profile (Excerpt):
- Kurt was certainly interested in mathematics when at the Gymnasium in Brunswick, but he had other broad interests, particularly in philosophy and in art history.
- Reidemeister graduated from the Brunswick Gymnasium in 1911 and entered the Albert-Ludwig University in Freiburg im Breisgau, one of the oldest universities in Germany founded in 1457.
- Reidemeister also attended lectures by the philosopher Heinrich Rickert (1863-1936) at Freiburg.
- As was the custom with German students of this period, Reidemeister attended several different universities, moving to Marburg and the Göttingen after his studies at Freiburg.
- However, Reidemeister did not become a Gymnasium teacher for, in October 1920, he went to Hamburg to take up the position of assistant to Erich Hecke.
- Against this background of hunger and poverty, Reidemeister studied algebraic number theory working on his doctorate advised by Hecke.
- Immediately he had written his doctoral thesis, Reidemeister became interested in geometry.
- The perspective and ideas that Blaschke presented, Reidemeister found absolutely fascinating and, quite unexpectedly, he completely changed the topics he was researching.
- Reidemeister gave a lecture on Spengler's book but he also wrote short stories and poems, publishing regularly in the leading Hamburg newspaper.
- On Hans Hahn's recommendation, despite having never habilitated, Reidemeister was appointed as associate professor of geometry at the University of Vienna in October 1923.
- It was Wirtinger who interested Reidemeister in knot theory, the topic for which he is best remembered today.
- In particular Wirtinger showed Reidemeister how to compute the fundamental group of a knot from its projection.
- This move to Austria was very beneficial for Reidemeister since it allowed him to escape from the misery of hyper-inflation in Germany with the strikes and unrest which resulted.
- While in Vienna, Reidemeister came across the Tractatus by Wittgenstein and joined the Vienna Circle of Logical Positivists.
- Led by Reidemeister, the group of mathematicians at Vienna spent a year studying the deep ideas on logic and mathematics in the Tractatus.
- In 1925 Reidemeister was offered the chair in Königsberg which had been left vacant when Wilhelm Meyer retired, which he accepted.
- In 1930 the German Mathematical Congress met in Königsberg and Reidemeister organised the first international conference on the philosophy of mathematics to be a part of the larger Congress.
- Reidemeister worked on the foundations of geometry and he wrote an important book on knot theory Knoten und Gruppen Ⓣ(Knots and groups) (1926).
- In the first part Reidemeister discusses the foundations of algebra, and bases affine and projective geometries on them.
- Reidemeister devoted a whole mathematics lecture to explaining why the behaviour of these students was totally unsupportable and not compatible with rational thinking.
- The aging Reidemeister always had an attitude of being easily prone to moral outrage, an attitude which had its root here.
- Blaschke immediately tried to help his colleague and collected signatures on a petition seeking to reinstate Reidemeister.
- After being suspended from his chair, Reidemeister went to Rome where he continued to undertake research.
- Perhaps due to Blaschke's efforts, he was appointed to Kurt Hensel's chair in Marburg at what was considered a smaller and less prestigious university.
- In fact, as Professor Reidemeister describes in detail in the present treatise, combinatory topology turns out to be a well-defined partial domain of the theory of polyhedra - a fact well calculated to demonstrate the elementary character of the subject and to justify Professor Reidemeister in providing a new and systematic presentation of it.
- Reidemeister had an important influence on group theory, partly through his work on knots and groups, partly through his influence on Otto Schreier.
- After he went to Marburg, Reidemeister's interests became almost exclusively philosophy, the foundations of mathematics and the history of mathematics.
- Reidemeister spent the two years 1948-50 at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton in the United States.
- In 1955 Reidemeister left Marburg when he was appointed to the University of Göttingen.
Born 13 October 1893, Brunswick, Germany. Died 8 July 1971, Göttingen, Germany.
View full biography at MacTutor
Tags relevant for this person:
Algebra, Group Theory, Knot Theory, Origin Germany, Physics, Topology
Mentioned in:
Definitions: 1
Thank you to the contributors under CC BY-SA 4.0! 
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- non-Github:
- @J-J-O'Connor
- @E-F-Robertson
References
Adapted from other CC BY-SA 4.0 Sources:
- O’Connor, John J; Robertson, Edmund F: MacTutor History of Mathematics Archive
