Person: Rund, Hanno
Hanno Rund was a German mathematician who spent much of his time in Africa. He published in differential geometry.
Mathematical Profile (Excerpt):
- His parents were Victor Rund and Martha von Neumann.
- Victor Rund earned a living as a teacher of German, teaching in schools in Natal and the Cape of Good Hope.
- Hanno, at the age of ten, attended a primary school in Cape Town.
- The Groote Schuur Primary School, in Rondebosch, a southern suburb of Cape Town, was founded in January 1936 and Hanno Rund attended the school from the time it opened in temporary accommodation.
- For his secondary education he attended the Rondebosch Boys High School, founded February 1897 in Rondebosch, which by the time Rund entered had achieved a high reputation.
- At the University of Cape Town, Rund took courses in Pure Mathematics, Applied Mathematics and Physics and graduated with a B.Sc. in 1946.
- Rund was appointed to the University of Cape Town and began teaching there in 1946.
- Rund submitted his thesis The Geometry of Finsler Spaces Considered as Generalized Minkowskian Spaces to the University of Cape Town in August 1950.
- Wilhelm Süss was appointed as the external examiner of Rund's thesis.
- Rund went to Germany in 1950 spending some time at Oberwolfach before being appointed as a docent at the University of Freiburg in 1951.
- Rund began publishing papers, the first to appear being Über die Parallelverschiebung in Finslerschen Räumen Ⓣ(On the parallel shift in Finsler spaces) (1951).
- In 1952 Rund habilitated in Freiburg, sponsored by Wilhelm Süss and Gerrit Bol (1906-1989).
- Rund had been appointed Professor and Head of the Department of Mathematics at the University of Natal.
- Rund moved from Natal to the University of South Africa where he was a Research Professor from 1962 to 1966.
- In 1966 Rund became Professor and Head of the Department of Mathematics at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg.
- In 1975 Rund, together with David Lovelock, published the book Tensor, differential forms, and variational principles.
- Here he was taught by Rund and, after graduating, he studied for a Ph.D. advised by Rund.
- He was a professor of Applied Mathematics at the University of Waterloo, Canada, during the time that Rund was there, then moved to the University of Arizona in 1974 where again he became Rund's colleague.
- We note that although Rund held his position at the University of Arizona for the rest of his career, he did spend the year 1983-84 back in South Africa at the University of Cape Town.
- Ever very popular as a teacher and adviser, Rund continually supervised Ph.D. candidates throughout his teaching career.
- This last statement is significant since Rund had a major impact on African mathematics particularly through the many Ph.D. students he advised while at various South African universities.
- In addition to Rund's books that we mentioned above, we also note that he published Invariant theory of variational problems on subspaces of a Riemannian manifold (1971), (with his Ph.D. student Jonathan H Beare) Variational properties of direction-dependent metric fields (1972), and Generalized connections and gauge fields on fibre bundles (1981).
- Rund was a keen mountaineer and was a member of the Mountain Club of South Africa.
Born 26 October 1925, Schwerin, Germany. Died 5 January 1993, Tucson, Arizona, USA.
View full biography at MacTutor
Tags relevant for this person:
Origin Germany
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
