Kurt Heegner
Kurt Heegner (German: [ˈheːɡnɐ]; 16 December 1893 – 2 February 1965) was a German private scholar from Berlin, who specialized in
mathematical discoveries in number theory and, in particular, the Stark–Heegner theorem
.
Life and career
Heegner was born and died in Berlin. In 1952, he published the
class number 1 problem. Heegner's work was not accepted for years, mainly due to his quoting of a portion of Heinrich Martin Weber
's work that was known to be incorrect (though he never used this result in the proof).
Heegner's proof was accepted as essentially correct after a 1967 announcement by
Bryan Birch, and definitively resolved by a paper by Harold Stark that had been delayed in publication until 1969 (Stark had independently arrived at a similar proof, but disagrees with the common notion that his proof is "more or less the same" as Heegner's).[1]
Stark attributed Heegner's mistakes to the fact he used a textbook by Weber that contained some results with incomplete proofs.
The book The Legacy of Leonhard Euler: A Tricentennial Tribute by Lokenath Debnath claims on page 64, that Heegner was a "retired Swiss mathematician", but he appears to have been neither Swiss nor retired at the time of his 1952 paper.[2][3][relevant?]
See also
Literature
- Heegner, Kurt (1952), "Diophantische Analysis und Modulfunktionen", S2CID 120109035
- Stark, H.M. (1969). "On the gap in the theorem of Heegner" (PDF). hdl:2027.42/33039.
References
- ISBN 978-0-8218-8698-4.
- ISBN 978-1-84816-526-7.
- OCLC 670430011.
External links
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