Heinrich-Wolfgang Leopoldt was a German mathematician, who worked on algebraic number theory.
Education
Leopoldt earned his Doctor of Philosophy in 1954 at the University of Hamburg under Helmut Hasse with the thesis Über Einheitengruppe und Klassenzahl reeller algebraischer Zahlkörper (On group of unity and class number of real algebraic number fields).
Career
As a post-doc he was from 1956 to 1958 at the Institute for Advanced Study. He was from 1964 ordentlicher professor at the University of Karlsruhe, where he was also director of the Mathematics Institute. In collaboration, Leopoldt and Tomio Kubota introduced and investigated p-adic L-functions (now named after them).
These functions are a component of Iwasawa theory and are a p-adic version of the Dirichlet L-functions.
With Hans Zassenhaus he also worked on computer algebra and its applications in number theory. Leopoldt with Peter Roquette also edited the collected works of his teacher Hasse (De Gruyter 1975).
Among his doctoral students are Werner Blum, Hans-Peter Rehm, Heinrich Matzat and Claus-Günther Schmidt.
Membership
Heidelberg Academy for Sciences and Humanities]
In 1979 he became a member of the Heidelberger Akademie der Wissenschaften.