Paul Gordan

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Not to be confused with Walter Gordon (physicist).

Paul Gordan
University of Erlangen-Nuremberg
Academic advisorsCarl Gustav Jacob Jacobi
Doctoral studentsEmmy Noether

Paul Albert Gordan (27 April 1837 – 21 December 1912) was a

University of Erlangen-Nuremberg
.

He was born in

Breslau, Germany (now Wrocław, Poland), and died in Erlangen
, Germany.

He was known as "the king of

invariants of binary forms of fixed degree is finitely generated.[4] Clebsch–Gordan coefficients are named after him and Alfred Clebsch. Gordan also served as the thesis advisor for Emmy Noether.[2]

A famous quote attributed to Gordan about David Hilbert's proof of Hilbert's basis theorem, a result which vastly generalized his result on invariants, is "This is not mathematics; this is theology."[3][5] The proof in question was the (non-constructive) existence of a finite basis for invariants. It is not clear if Gordan really said this since the earliest reference to it is 25 years after the events and after his death. Nor is it clear whether the quote was intended as criticism, or praise, or a subtle joke. Gordan himself encouraged Hilbert and used Hilbert's results and methods, and the widespread story that he opposed Hilbert's work on invariant theory is a myth (though he did correctly point out in a referee's report that some of the reasoning in Hilbert's paper was incomplete).[6]

Publications

  • Gordan, Paul (1885). Vorlesungen über Invariantentheorie. Vol. 1. Teubner. Retrieved 12 April 2014.
  • Gordan, Paul (1887). Dr. Paul Gordan's Vorlesungen über Invariantentheorie. Vol. 2. B. G. Teubner. Retrieved 12 April 2014.
  • Gordan, Paul (1987) [1885], Kerschensteiner, Georg (ed.), Vorlesungen über Invariantentheorie (2nd ed.), New York: Chelsea Publishing Co. or American Mathematical Society,
    MR 0917266

Notes

  1. ISBN 9783642224645
    .
  2. ^ a b O'Connor, John J.; Robertson, Edmund F., "Paul Gordan", MacTutor History of Mathematics Archive, University of St Andrews.
  3. ^
    OCLC 49493513
    .
  4. ^
    OCLC 174767718 {{citation}}: |author= has generic name (help)CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link
    ).
  5. ^ Hermann Weyl, David Hilbert. 1862–1943, Obituary Notices of Fellows of the Royal Society (1944).
  6. ^ Mclarty, Colin (2008), Theology and its discontents (PDF), archived from the original (PDF) on 16 January 2009

See also

References

External links
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