Background
Kurt Werner Friedrich Reidemeister was born on October 13, 1893, in Braunschweig, Germany, the son of Hans Reidemeister and the former Sophie Langerfeldt.
Kurt Werner Friedrich Reidemeister (13 October 1893 – 8 July 1971) was a mathematician born in Braunschweig (Brunswick), Germany.
University of Freiburg, Freiburg im Breisgau, Baden-Württemberg, Germany
In 1911 Reidemeister entered the Albert-Ludwig University in Freiburg im Breisgau, one of the oldest universities in Germany founded in 1457.
University of Göttingen, Göttingen, Lower Saxony, Germany
Beginning in 1912, Kurt Reidemeister studied in Freiburg, Munich, Marburg, and Göttingen. In 1920, he got the staatsexamen (master's degree) in mathematics, philosophy, physics, chemistry, and geology.
Kurt Werner Friedrich Reidemeister, a German mathematician.
mathematician scientist topologist
Kurt Werner Friedrich Reidemeister was born on October 13, 1893, in Braunschweig, Germany, the son of Hans Reidemeister and the former Sophie Langerfeldt.
Reidemeister graduated from the Brunswick Gymnasium in 1911 and entered the Albert-Ludwig University in Freiburg im Breisgau, one of the oldest universities in Germany founded in 1457. His student years at the universities of Freiburg, Munich, and Gottingen were interrupted by four years of military service during World War I.
He then passed the Staatsexamen in mathematics (Edmund Landau was his examiner), philosophy (at Freiburg H. Rickert had been his teacher), physics, chemistry, and geology in 1920. After having accepted an assistantship with E. Hecke at the University of Hamburg, he earned his doctorate in 1921 with a dissertation on algebraic number theory, “Ober die Relativklassenzahl gewisser relativquadratischer Zahlkorper” (published in Abhandlungen aus dem Mathematischen Seminar, Universitat Hamburg, 1921).
At the same time he studied affine geometry, published several papers, and assisted Wilhelm Blaschke in editing the second volume of his Vorlesungen uber Differentialgeometrie, entitled Affine Differentialgeometrie (Berlin, 1923).
In 1923 Kurt Reidemeister accepted an associate professorship in Vienna, where he came in close contact with Hans Hahn, with research on the foundations of mathematics, and with the Vienna philosophical circle. Two years later he accepted a full professorship at Konigsberg, where he worked with other young mathematicians, notably Ruth Moufang, Richard Brauer, and Werner Burau. His interest at this time was in the foundations of geometry and combinatorial topology. He wrote books and articles in both fields. His Knotentheorie remained the standard work on knot theory for several decades.
In April 1933 Reidemeister was expelled from his Konigsberg professorship because he opposed the Nazis. In 1934 he became a professor at the University of Marburg, in the chair of Kurt Hensel. He remained there - except for a two-year visit to the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton in 1948-1950 - until he moved to the University of Gottingen in 1955. While at Marburg he collaborated with F. Bachmann, laying the foundations of a development which culminated in Bachmann’s Aufbau der Geometrie aus dem Spiegelungsbegriff (1959), and with Helene Braun.
He had worked out a modern course along the lines of Felix Klein’s “Erlanger Programm,” classifying the various geometries by their related groups. His book Ratim und Zahl (Berlin-Gottingen-Heidelberg, 1957) gave an idea of this concrete approach to mathematics in which mathematical thinking and reflections on thought are to illuminate each other.
Besides mathematics, it was the historical origin of mathematical and rational thought that fascinated Reidemeister most - the Greeks in particular and philosophy in general. Three of his historical articles were republished in 1949 under the title Das exakte Denken der Griechen. In several publications, he expounded his own philosophical position, one of critical rationalism.
He reproached it for a lack of objectivity and logical reasoning. Although an advocate of enlightenment and rationality, Reidemeister was highly sensitive and responsive to beauty and symmetry. Among his publications are two small volumes of essays and poems: Figuren (Frankfurt, 1946) and Von deni Schonen (Hamburg, 1947). His last book was a memorial to Hilbert: Hilbert-Gedenkband (Berlin Heidelberg-New York, 1971).
Reidemeister was strongly opposed to the Nazis' political approach, as well as to existentialism, which came into vogue in Germany after 1945.
The foundations of geometry and topology, established on a purely combinatorial and group-theoretical basis without the introduction of a limit concept, always held a prominent place in Reidemeister's mathematical research. He was convinced that problems in mathematics that are original should arise from vivid perception, and even from the beauty of geometrical objects, and that abstraction should only be the result of intensive thought, which justifies the lack of immediate visualization. In accordance with this view, he was critical of the modern trend of replacing traditional geometry by linear algebra.
Kurt Reidemeister was a member of the Vienna Circle (German: Wiener Kreis) of Logical Empiricism, which was a group of philosophers and scientists drawn from the natural and social sciences, logic and mathematics who met regularly from 1924 to 1936 at the University of Vienna.
Reidemeister was married to Elisabeth Wagner, a photographer and the daughter of a Protestant minister at Riga.