Background

Wilhelm Franz Meyer (full name Friedrich Wilhelm Franz Meyer) was born on September 2, 1856, in Magdeburg, Province of Saxony, Kingdom of Prussia (now Sachsen-Anhalt, Germany) to the family of Friedrich Wilhelm Julius Meyer and Elise Johanna Amalie Knorr.

Education

Meyer attended the Domgymnasium Magdeburg in his native city, where he graduated in 1874. Wilhelm Meyer followed the German tradition of the time in studying at a number of different universities. He attended the University of Leipzig and studied at the Friedrich Wilhelm University of Berlin taking courses by Kummer, Weierstrass, and Kronecker. He was awarded his doctorate in 1878 by the University of Munich. Meyer presented his habilitation to the University of Tübingen in 1880.

Career

In 1880 Meyer qualified for lecturing at the University of Tübingen, and in 1888 he became a full professor at the Bergakademie of Clausthalzellerfeld. From October 1897 until October 1924, when he retired, he taught at the University of Königsberg.

Meyer was a many-sided and very knowledgeable mathematician, whose list of writings includes 136 titles. His principal field of interest, however, was geometry, especially algebraic geometry and the related projective invariant theory. His Habilitationsschrift, which was published in 1883 as Apolarität und rationale Kurven, shows this direction of his research. In this work, he extended the apolarity theory, created by Reye, to a multidimensional projective geometry based on the theory of rational curves. At the time such considerations were not completely obvious.

Other of Meyer’s works from this period deal with algebraic curves and their production, and with related algebraic questions. He early showed himself to be one of the leading experts on invariant theory. In 1892 he composed for the Deutsche Mathematiker-Vereinigung a long report on this subject, which was translated into French, Italian, and Polish. In this work, he presented the development of invariant theory from its beginning in the middle of the nineteenth century to the end of the century and the appearance of the decisive finiteness theorems of Gordan and Hilbert. Meyer also made many individual contributions to invariant theory. This area of research went somewhat out of fashion during his lifetime, however, chiefly as a result of Hilbert’s work.

Meyer was one of the founders of the Encyklopädie der mathematischen Wissenschaften. He, H. Weber, and F. Klein were responsible for planning this project. The Encyklopädie, which was conceived on a large scale, was supported from 1895 by a syndicate of German academies. From the turn of the century until the 1930s some twenty volumes appeared; they treated all fields of mathematics and their applications. Meyer wrote the articles on potential theory (with H. Burkhardt), invariant theory, the new geometry of the triangle (with G. Berkhan), third-order surfaces, and surfaces of the fourth and higher orders.

The editing of such a vast work required great effort and presupposed considerable knowledge. In this regard Meyer benefited from his extensive familiarity with the literature, gained in large measure through the 2,000 reviews that he wrote for Fortschritte der Mathematik; his knowledge of foreign languages was also very useful to him. Of special note are the articles on third- and fourth-degree surfaces, which he composed at an advanced age. At that period, around 1930, Meyer was the only German mathematician who still possessed a comprehensive view of the abundant material, produced mainly in the nineteenth century, on special algebraic curves and surfaces. Meyer conducted investigations in the geometry of the triangle, handled in the spirit of Klein’s Erlangen program, and gave lectures discussing the essential aspects of mathematical research in the spirit of the time and emphasizing the importance of simple algebraic identities, the symmetries of group theory, and transformation principles as a source of geometric theorems.

Meyer was an excellent teacher who had many students. Most East Prussian mathematics teachers at the beginning of the twentieth century were trained by him.

Achievements

• Meyer one of the most renowned mathematicians of Germany of the time. He was a member of numerous professional societies: In 1890 he became a founding member of the German Mathematical Association (1902 its chairman), in 1892 becoming a member of the German Academy of Sciences Leopoldina, the Berlin Mathematical Society, the Circolo Matematico di Palermo, a corresponding member of the Société Royale des Sciences de Liège and in 1933 a member of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences.

Works

More photos

• book

  • Encyklopädie der Mathematischen Wissenschaften mit Einschluss ihrer Anwendungen 1904
  • Differential-und Integralrechnung, Volume 2: Integralrechnung 1905
  • Apolarität und Rationale Curven: Eine Systematische Voruntersuchung zu Einer Allgemeinen Theorie der Linearen Räume 1883

Membership

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  German Mathematical Association , Germany

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  Academy of Sciences Leopoldina , Germany

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  Berlin Mathematical Society , Germany

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  Circolo Matematico di Palermo , Italy

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  Bavarian Academy of Sciences and Humanities , Germany

• Société Royale des Sciences de Liège , France

Connections

Wilhelm Franz Meyer married Malwine Stark in 1888. They had three sons and a daughter.

Father:

Friedrich Wilhelm Julius Meyer

Mother:

Elise Johanna Amalie Knorr

Wife:

Malwine Stark

Student:

Theodor Kaluza

References

• Dictionary of Scientific Biography: Volumes 9 & 10
  1981