Kurt Otto Friedrichs
Kurt Otto Friedrichs | |
---|---|
Courant Institute | |
Doctoral advisor | Richard Courant |
Doctoral students | Eugene Isaacson Peter Lax Cathleen Synge Morawetz Leonard Sarason Wolfgang R. Wasow Chia-Kun Chu Jerome Berkowitz |
Kurt Otto Friedrichs (September 28, 1901 – December 31, 1982) was a German-American
Biography
Friedrichs was born in Kiel, Schleswig-Holstein on September 28, 1901. His family soon moved to Düsseldorf, where he grew up. He attended several different universities in Germany studying the philosophical works of Heidegger and Husserl, but finally decided that mathematics was his real calling. During the 1920s, Friedrichs pursued this field in Göttingen, which had a renowned Mathematical Institute under the direction of Richard Courant. Courant became a close colleague and lifelong friend of Friedrichs.
In 1931, Friedrichs became a full professor of mathematics at the
Courant had left Germany in 1933 and had founded an institute for graduate studies in mathematics at New York University. Friedrichs joined him when he arrived in 1937 and remained there for forty years. He was instrumental in the development of the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences, which eventually became one of the most distinguished research institutes for applied mathematics in the world. Friedrichs died in New Rochelle, New York on December 31, 1982.
Friedrichs's greatest contribution to applied mathematics was his work on
A member of the
Selected bibliography
- R. von Mises and K. O. Friedrichs, Fluid Dynamics, Springer-Verlag (1971).
- K. O. Friedrichs, Perturbation of Spectra in Hilbert Space, American Mathematical Society (1965).
- K. O. Friedrichs, Mathematical aspects of the quantum theory of fields, Interscience (1953).[8]
- K. O. Friedrichs, Spectral Theory of Operators in Hilbert Space, Springer-Verlag (1981).
- Friedrichs, Kurt Otto (1986), Wolfgang Wasow, Harold Weitzner.
See also
References
External links
- Kurt Otto Friedrichs at the Mathematics Genealogy Project
- O'Connor, John J.; Robertson, Edmund F., "Kurt Otto Friedrichs", MacTutor History of Mathematics Archive, University of St Andrews
- National Academy of Sciences Biographical Memoir
- Literature by and about Kurt Otto Friedrichs in the German National Library catalogue