| Carl Ludwig Siegel | |
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 Carl Ludwig Siegel in 1975
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| Born | December 31, 1896 Berlin, Germany |
| Died | April 4, 1981 (aged 84) Göttingen, Germany |
| Fields | Mathematics |
| Institutions | Johann Wolfgang Goethe-Universität Princeton University |
| Alma mater | University of Göttingen |
| Doctoral advisor | Edmund Landau |
| Known for | Number theory |
| Notable awards | Wolf Prize in Mathematics |
Carl Ludwig Siegel (December 31, 1896 – April 4, 1981) was a mathematician specialising in number theory.
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Biography
Siegel was born in Berlin, where he enrolled at the Humboldt University in Berlin in 1915 as a student in mathematics, astronomy, and physics. Amongst his teachers were Max Planck and Ferdinand Georg Frobenius, whose influence made the young Siegel abandon astronomy and turn towards number theory instead.
In 1917 he was drafted into the German Army and had to interrupt his studies. After the end of World War I, he enrolled at the Georg-August University of Göttingen, studying under Edmund Landau, who was his doctoral thesis supervisor (Ph.D. in 1920). He stayed in Göttingen as a teaching and research assistant; many of his groundbreaking results were published during this period. In 1922, he was appointed professor at the Johann Wolfgang Goethe-Universität of Frankfurt am Main.
Career
In 1938, he returned to Göttingen before emigrating in 1940 via Norway to the United States, where he joined the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, where he had already spent a sabbatical in 1935. He returned to Göttingen only after World War II, when he accepted a post as professor in 1951, which he kept until his retirement in 1959.
Siegel's work on number theory and diophantine equations and celestial mechanics in particular won him numerous honours. In 1978, he was awarded the Wolf Prize in Mathematics, one of the most prestigious in the field.
Siegel's work spans analytic number theory; and his theorem on the finiteness of the integer points of curves, for genus > 1, is historically important as a major general result on diophantine equations, when the field was essentially undeveloped. He worked on L-functions, discovering the (presumed illusory) Siegel zero phenomenon. His work derived from the Hardy-Littlewood circle method on quadratic forms proved very influential on the later, adele group theories encompassing the use of theta-functions. The Siegel modular forms are recognised as part of the moduli theory of abelian varieties. In all this work the structural implications of analytic methods show through.
Andre Weil, without hesitation, named[1] Siegel as the greatest mathematician of the first half of the 20th century. A list of the greatest mathematicians of the 20th century would include Weil himself, Jon von Neumann, Kurt Godel, Srinavasa Ramanujan, Emmy Noether, Norbert Wiener, and Stefan Banach.
See also
- Siegel's lemma
- Thue-Siegel-Roth theorem
- Brauer-Siegel theorem
- Siegel upper half-space
- Siegel-Weil formula
- Siegel modular form
- Smith–Minkowski–Siegel mass formula
- Riemann-Siegel theta function
- Riemann–Siegel formula
References
- O'Connor, John J.; Robertson, Edmund F., "Carl Ludwig Siegel", MacTutor History of Mathematics archive, http://www-history.mcs.st-andrews.ac.uk/Biographies/Siegel.html.
- ^ Krantz, Steven G. (2002). Mathematical Apocrypha. Mathematical Association of America. pp. 185-186. ISBN 0-88385-539-9.
External links
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