Person: Fröhlich, Albrecht
Albrecht Fröhlich was a German mathematician who made important contributions to group theory.
Mathematical Profile (Excerpt):
- His parents were Frida and Julius Fröhlich.
- After attending an elementary school, Albrecht became a pupil at the Wittlesbacher Gymnasium in 1926.
- In 1933 Albrecht left the Gymnasium.
- Albrecht joined a group of Jewish students with left wing views who openly opposed the Nazis.
- Albrecht had to persuade the Palestinian authorities to let him leave, and he had to obtain a visa to go to Britain so this meant that he had to convince some officials that, although he was a railway electrician, he really had been accepted for university study.
- Despite the late start, Fröhlich made quite remarkable progress and began research working under Hans Heilbronn in 1948.
- Fröhlich's thesis was in two parts, the first being completed by September 1949 and published as the paper The representation of a finite group as a group of automorphisms on a finite Abelian group (1950).
- Before completing his doctoral studies, Fröhlich was appointed as an assistant lecturer at Leicester where he began teaching in 1952.
- In all five of these papers Fröhlich continued to build on the work of this doctoral thesis.
- His record was now sufficiently outstanding that in 1955, only three years after completing his doctorate, Fröhlich was appointed as a reader at King's College, London.
- Fröhlich's course was written up as Local fields and occupied the first 41 pages of the Proceedings.
- Perhaps the most remarkable fact from Fröhlich's remarkable career is that his most stunning result was published in 1972 when he was 56 years old.
- Further developments leading on from this paper led to Fröhlich receiving the Senior Berwick Prize from the London Mathematical Society in 1976.
- At the age of 60 Fröhlich had made the type of breakthrough that most world leading mathematicians make at half this age.
- After he retired in 1981 Fröhlich continued to publish outstanding research, and also some extremely important books.
- Among the honours Fröhlich received, in addition to those mentioned above, were the London Mathematical Society's De Morgan Medal and honorary degrees from Bordeaux and Bristol.
Born 22 May 1916, Munich, Germany. Died 8 November 2001, Cambridge, England.
View full biography at MacTutor
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Origin Germany
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References
Adapted from other CC BY-SA 4.0 Sources:
- O’Connor, John J; Robertson, Edmund F: MacTutor History of Mathematics Archive
