Background
Felix Hausdorff was born on November 8, 1868 in Wroclaw, Dolnoslaskie, Poland, in the family of Louis and Johanna Tietz Hausdorff. The family moved to Leipzig, Germany, in 1871.
Felix Hausdorff was born on November 8, 1868 in Wroclaw, Dolnoslaskie, Poland, in the family of Louis and Johanna Tietz Hausdorff. The family moved to Leipzig, Germany, in 1871.
From 1878 to 1887 Felix Hausdorff attended the Nicolai School in Leipzig, a facility that had a reputation as a hotbed of humanistic education. In his graduation in 1887, he was the only one who reached the highest grade. From summer term 1887 to summer semester 1891 Hausdorff studied mathematics and astronomy, mainly in his native city of Leipzig, interrupted by one semester in Freiburg and Berlin.
In 1896, following his father’s death, Hausdorff succeeded him as a partner in the publishing firm Hausdorff and Company, which produced the leading trade magazine for spinning, weaving, and dyeing. That same year, he was accepted as a lecturer at Leipzig University.
In 1897, the first of Hausdorffs four full-length literary works was published. He wrote these books under the pseudonym Dr. Paul Mongre so that he could express himself freely without jeopardizing his university position. It was published by the same company that had published Nietzsche’s book, and was even produced with a similar cover. The second book written under the name Mongre, "Chaos in Cosmic Choice", dealt with metaphysical relationships between space and time.
Felix had worked as a lecturer at Leipzig since 1896, but his promotion was opposed by a fourth of the faculty on the grounds that Hausdorff was of the "faith of Moses."
In 1897, Hausdorff began publishing papers on topics in mathematics, including non-Euclidean geometry-complex numbers, and probability. In 1910, Hausdorff accepted a position as associate professor at the University of Bonn. Although he had written one or two technical articles per year for two decades, he published nothing from 1910 until 1914. Felix moved to Greifswald in 1913 to become a professor at the university there. The following year, he published his monumental "Grundzuge der Mengenlehre."
In 1921 Hausdorff returned to the University of Bonn, where he worked as a professor for the rest of his career. He was respected as the most capable mathematician in Bonn and as a professor whose lectures were well reasoned and clearly delivered. He taught until 1935, when he reached the mandatory retirement age of sixty-seven. He continued to publish mathematical papers until 1938.
Hausdorff did not participate actively in politics.
In 1899 Felix married Charlotte Goldschmidt, with whom he had a child Lenore Hausdorff.