Theodor Vahlen

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Karl Theodor Vahlen
Prussian Academy of Science
In office
1 January 1939 – 1 April 1943
Personal details
Born(1869-06-30)30 June 1869
University of Berlin
ProfessionProfessor
Known forJournal editor Deutsche Mathematik
Signature
Military service
Allegiance German Empire
Branch/serviceImperial German Army
Years of service1914–1918
RankMajor
Unit68th (6th Royal Saxon) Field Artillery Regiment
Battles/warsWorld War I
AwardsIron Cross, 1st class and 2nd class

Karl Theodor Vahlen (30 June 1869 – 16 November 1945) was a mathematician and professor who was a member of the Nazi Party. He served as the first Gauleiter of Pomerania and was a member of both the SA and SS.

Early years

Theodore Vahlen was born in

University of Berlin and receiving his doctorate there in 1893.[1]
From 1893, Vahlen was a
eastern front (1916-1917). Wounded in action on three occasions, he earned the Iron Cross, first and second class. He left the service on 30 September 1918 with the rank of Major of the reserves. He returned to teaching at the University of Greifswald.[2]

Political career

Vahlen in 1919 initially became a member of the

National Socialist Freedom Party, a Nazi front organization, becoming its Gauleiter in Pomerania on 4 April 1924. In May 1924, under its auspices, he was elected to the Reichstag for electoral constituency 6 (Pomerania). From mid-1924 through September 1926, he was the co-publisher of the daily newspaper Norddeutscher Beobachter (North German Observer).[3]

When the ban on the Nazi Party was lifted, Gregor Strasser, Hitler's authorized representative for northern Germany, selected him to be the first Party Gauleiter for Gau Pomerania on 22 March 1925 and Hitler confirmed this appointment. Vahlen formally rejoined the Party on 11 May (membership number 3,961). In December 1925, Vahlen joined the National Socialist Working Association, a group of north and northwest German Gauleiters closely associated with Strasser. On 1 March 1926, Vahlen joined Strasser and his brother Otto Strasser in founding the publishing house Kampf-Verlag in Berlin.[4]

By 1927, Adolf Hitler was replacing many early Party leaders whom he considered not to have the attributes to be effective party administrators.[5] Consequently, Vahlen was placed on indefinite leave on 1 May 1927 and his newly appointed Deputy, Walther von Corswant, was effectively put in charge. On 21 August, Vahlen was finally dismissed and Corswant officially became Gauleiter.[4]

Also in May 1927, Vahlen faced disciplinary actions stemming from an incident a few years earlier when he was

Technische Hochschule Wien.[7][8]

Once Hitler became

anti-Semitic. From 1934, he was ordinarius professor at the University of Berlin, a position he held until attaining emeritus status in 1937.[7]

In July 1933 Vahlen joined the Sturmabteilung (SA) but on 10 July 1936 he switched to the Schutzstaffel (SS) with the rank of Sturmbannführer and was assigned to the SS Main Office. On 30 January 1938 he was attached to the staff of the Reichsführer-SS. He received successive promotions, the last being to SS-Brigadeführer on 9 November 1943.[10]

During the period 1933 to 1937, Vahlen served as third vice president of the

Kaiser-Wilhelm Gesellschaft. In January 1934 he became an employee in the University Department of the Prussian Ministry of Science, Art and Public Education, and by 26 April he was head of the department. From 1 June 1934, he was a Ministerial Director and Chief of the Science Office at the Reich Ministry of Science, Education and Culture.[11] Actually, the Science Office was split into two components, WI, a continuation of the Prussian department, and WII, the army office for research. Vahlen was head of WI, but, in actuality, the deputy chief, the chemist Franz Bachér ran WI.[12] From this position, in 1936, Vahlen began publishing the journal Deutsche Mathematik, for which the Berlin mathematician Ludwig Bieberbach was the editor; in the journal, political articles preceded the scholarly articles. On 1 January 1937 Vahlen was relieved of his duties at the Ministry at his own request. Through a manipulation of the election process by Vahlen and his supporters, he was selected as president of the Prussian Academy of Sciences effective 1 January 1939 and remained in this post until 1 April 1943.[6][7][13] In April 1944, Vahlen moved to Vienna after his Berlin apartment was destroyed in an air raid and again taught at the Technische Hochschule Wien. In August 1944 he moved to Prague and worked as a lecturer at the Charles University. At the end of the war in May 1945 he was imprisoned, and he died in Czech custody in November 1945.[14]

Mathematics

Vahlen gained his doctorate with Beiträge zu einer additiven Zahlentheorie, and continued to specialise in number theory, but later turned to applied mathematics.

Theodor Vahlen was an early proponent of

fractional-linear transformations of Clifford algebras
, he is sometimes remembered for the Vahlen matrices. These are matrices with coefficients in a Clifford algebra that act on a projective line over a ring. In 1985 Lars Ahlfors recalled the article as follows: "The method was introduced as early as 1901 by K.T. Vahlen in a rather short, but remarkable, paper. His motivation was to unify the theory of motions in Euclidean, hyperbolic, and elliptic space, which is obviously in the spirit of Clifford. In this respect the paper seems somewhat antiquated, but the essence is in the method it advocates."[15] The subject of relativity was a polemical issue in Nazi Germany. As Mark Walker writes

Eventually Vahlen adopted the common tactic of ascribing the theory of relativity to other "Aryan" physicists, thereby accusing Einstein of plagiarism, but also making the theory palatable to the National Socialist state.[6]: 97 

Works

  • 1899: "Rationale Funktion der Wurzeln, symmetrische und Affektfunktionen", (i.e. "Rational functions of roots, symmetric and effect-functions")
    Klein's encyclopedia
    , 1–1.
  • 1900: "Arithmetische Theorie der Formen", (i.e. "Arithmetic Theory of Forms") Klein's encyclopedia, Volume 1-2
  • 1902: "Über Bewegungen und complexe Zahlen", (i.e. "On Motions and Complex Numbers") Mathematische Annalen 55:585–93
  • 1905: Abstrakte Geometrie. Untersuchungen über die Grundlagen der euklidischen und nicht-euklidischen Geometrie, (i.e. Arithmetic Geometry. Studies of the Foundations of Euclidean and Non-Euclidean Geometry), Leipzig,[16] 2nd edition 1940, Deutsche Mathematik, 2nd supplement
  • 1911: Konstruktionen und Approximationen in systematischer Darstellung, (i.e. Systematic Representations of Constructions and Approximations) Teubner[17]
  • 1922: Ballistik (i.e. Ballistics) de Gruyter[18] 2nd edition 1942
  • 1929: Deviation und Kompensation, (i.e. Deviation and Compensation)
    Vieweg-Verlag
  • 1942: "Die Paradoxien der relativen Mechanik", (i.e. "Paradoxes of relative mechanics") Leipzig, Deutsche Mathematik, 3rd supplement

Bibliography

References

  1. ^ Theodor Vahlen at the Mathematics Genealogy Project
  2. ^ Höffkes 1986, p. 354.
  3. ^ Miller & Schulz 2021, pp. 507–508.
  4. ^ a b Miller & Schulz 2021, p. 508.
  5. ^ Orlow 1969, p. 119.
  6. ^
    ISBN 0-306-44941-2
  7. ^ a b c Hentschel, 1996, Appendix F; see entry for Vahlen.
  8. ^ Macrakis, 1993, pp. 78-79.
  9. ^ Richard von Mises and the economist Ludwig von Mises were brothers.
  10. ^ Miller & Schulz 2021, p. 509-510.
  11. ^ Miller & Schulz 2021, pp. 506, 509.
  12. ^ Beyerchen, 1977, p. 57.
  13. ^ Beyerchen, 1977, pp. 144-145.
  14. ^ Miller & Schulz 2021, p. 510.
  15. ISBN 3-540-13543-X
  16. ISSN 0002-9904
    .
  17. ISSN 0002-9904
    .
  18. doi:10.1090/s0002-9904-1923-03703-8
    .

External links

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