Helmut Heinrich Schaefer was a German mathematician at home on both sides of the Atlantic.
Education
As teenager Helmut Schaefer attended the Sankt Afra boarding school in Meissen, Germany on a merit based scholarship. After the war he studied mathematics in Dresden and Leipzig, where he earned his doctorate in 1951 and his habilitation in 1954.
Career
His work centered on functional analysis. His two best known scientific monographs are titled Topological Vector Spaces (1966) and Banach Lattices and Positive Operators (1974). The first of these was subsequently translated into Spanish and Russian.
The second made him an internationally recognized and leading scholar in this particular field of mathematics.
(Roquette & Wolff, 2006)
In 1943, then 18, he was recruited to serve as interpreter of Anglo-American intelligence. Professor Ernst Hölder served as his academic advisor.
In 1956 he accepted an offer from the University of Halle (Saale) as professor of mathematics. Then in 1963 he accepted an offer from the University of Tübingen in Germany where he remained until his retirement in 1990.
Interrupting this period on several occasions and following retirement in Tübingen he spent a number of one-year terms or semesters as visiting or full professor at various American universities, including the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, the University of Maryland at College Park, the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, Texas Agricultural and Mechanical University at College Station, and Florida Atlantic University at Boca Raton.
In Tübingen he served two terms as department head He remained active in mathematical research until the year 1999, at which point he completely dedicated himself to his lifelong hobby of astronomy, especially astrophotography. Earlier, he was admitted to the Academy of Sciences in Zaragoza (Spain).
Ten of his doctoral students went on to become professors at various universities in Germany and the United States. (Roquette & Wolff, 2006).
Membership
Heidelberg Academy for Sciences and Humanities]
In 1978, Helmut Schaefer was accepted as full member of the Mathematics and Natural Sciences Class of the Heidelberg Academy of Sciences.