Person: Petersson, Hans
Hans Petersson was a German mathematician who worked in the theory of modular and automorphic forms.
Mathematical Profile (Excerpt):
- The province of Posen had been named Poznań but given the German name of Posen around the time of Petersson's birth.
- Petersson studied for his doctorate at Hamburg University where his studies in algebraic number theory were supervised by Hecke.
- Petersson was an Aryan so was not affected by the Civil Service Law, passed on 7 April 1933, which provided the means of removing Jewish teachers from the universities.
- Petersson asked Hecke for advice and he suggested that he join the Sturmabteilung (Stormtroopers).
- Although Petersson had a strong dislike for the National Socialists, he acted out of self-preservation.
- Hecke, Blaschke and Artin, all professors at Hamburg, requested Petersson's promotion on 8 June 1934.
- Petersson was now in a difficult financial position, only being a Privatdozent but having to support a wife.
- Lammers sent Petersson's request to be considered for a chair to the Ministry of Education who asked three known Nazi supporters Tornier, Bieberbach and Riebesell for their opinions.
- The Ministry of Education, having received reasonable but not particularly strong references, decided not to offer Petersson a chair.
- Blaschke tried to obtain a chair for Petersson in Calcutta in 1935 but was unsuccessful.
- Having now satisfied the six years teaching experience criterion, an application went in from Hamburg for Petersson's promotion in June 1935.
- On 1 May 1937 Petersson joined the Nazi party, after a lengthy explanation of why his name was not given a German spelling, still trying to gain favour.
- Besides Petersson has been a party member since 1 May 1937.
- Petersson in the meantime has likewise completed an eight-week military exercise.
- Professor Petersson represents the rarely occurring case of a mathematician who stands without reservation on the ground of the National Socialists and besides is active in the Sturmabteilung with a will.
- Blaschke requested that Petersson return to Hamburg.
- Petersson was reinstated in Hamburg in March 1947.
- Petersson's leading contributions to the theory of modular and automorphic forms began with the introduction in 1939 of his inner product as a tool for studying these functions.
- So what is now completely standard linear algebra for all mathematicians was, when Petersson published Konstruktion der sämtlichen Lösungen einer Riemannschen Funktionalgleichung durch Dirichlet-Reihen mit Eulerscher Produktentwicklung Ⓣ(Construction of all solutions of the Riemann functional equation by Dirichlet series with Euler product development) in 1939, at the forefront of the latest research.
- In 1982 Petersson published an important book Modulfunktionen und quadratische Formen Ⓣ(Module functions and quadratic forms) in Springer-Verlag's Ergebnisse der Mathematik und ihrer Grenzgebiete series.
- Petersson continued to undertake important research after he retired in 1970 and his final paper Über Spuren von Modulformen und die Eisensteinschen Reihen in den Kongruenzklassen der rationalen Modulgruppe Ⓣ(On traces of modular forms and the Eisenstein series in the congruence classes of the rational modular group) appeared in 1986, two years after his death.
Born 26 June 1902, Bentschen, Posen, Germany (now Poznań, Poland). Died 9 November 1984, Münster, Germany.
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Origin Poland
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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
