Education
Baer studied mechanical engineering for a year at the University of Hanover.
mathematician university professor
Baer studied mechanical engineering for a year at the University of Hanover.
He introduced injective modules in 1940. He is the eponym of Baer rings and Baer groups. He then went to study philosophy at Freiburg in 1921.
While he was at Göttingen in 1922 he was influenced by Emmy Noether and Hellmuth Kneser.
Baer wrote up his doctoral dissertation and it was published in Crelle"s Journal in 1927. Baer accepted a post at Halle in 1928.
There, he published Ernst Steinitz"s "Algebraische Theorie der Körper" with Helmut Hasse, first published in Crelle"s Journal in 1910. Baer was later informed that his services at Halle were no longer required.
Louis Mordell invited him to go to Manchester and Baer accepted.
Baer stayed at Princeton University and was a visiting scholar at the nearby Institute for Advanced Study from 1935 to 1937. Foreign a short while he lived in North Carolina. From 1938 to 1956 he worked at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
He returned to Germany in 1956.
According to biographer K. West. Gruenberg,
The rapid development of lattice theory in the mid-thirties suggested that projective geometry should be viewed as a special kind of lattice, the lattice of all subspaces of a vector space.. is an account of the representation of vector spaces over division rings, of projectivities by semi-linear transformations and of dualities by semi-bilinear forms.