45 Facts About David Hilbert

1.

David Hilbert was a German mathematician and one of the most influential mathematicians of the 19th and early 20th centuries.

2.

David Hilbert adopted and defended Georg Cantor's set theory and transfinite numbers.

3.

David Hilbert is known as one of the founders of proof theory and mathematical logic.

4.

David Hilbert, the first of two children and only son of Otto and Maria Therese David Hilbert, was born in the Province of Prussia, Kingdom of Prussia, either in Konigsberg or in Wehlau near Konigsberg where his father worked at the time of his birth.

5.

In late 1872, David Hilbert entered the Friedrichskolleg Gymnasium ; but, after an unhappy period, he transferred to and graduated from the more science-oriented Wilhelm Gymnasium.

6.

David Hilbert developed a lifelong friendship with the shy, gifted Minkowski.

7.

David Hilbert obtained his doctorate in 1885, with a dissertation, written under Ferdinand von Lindemann, titled Uber invariante Eigenschaften spezieller binarer Formen, insbesondere der Kugelfunktionen.

8.

David Hilbert remained at the University of Konigsberg as a Privatdozent from 1886 to 1895.

9.

David Hilbert remained there for the rest of his life.

10.

At the University of Gottingen, David Hilbert was surrounded by a social circle of some of the most important mathematicians of the 20th century, such as Emmy Noether and Alonzo Church.

11.

Between 1902 and 1939 David Hilbert was editor of the Mathematische Annalen, the leading mathematical journal of the time.

12.

David Hilbert considered the mathematician Hermann Minkowski to be his "best and truest friend".

13.

David Hilbert was baptized and raised a Calvinist in the Prussian Evangelical Church.

14.

David Hilbert later left the Church and became an agnostic.

15.

David Hilbert argued that mathematical truth was independent of the existence of God or other a priori assumptions.

16.

David Hilbert lived to see the Nazis purge many of the prominent faculty members at University of Gottingen in 1933.

17.

About a year later, David Hilbert attended a banquet and was seated next to the new Minister of Education, Bernhard Rust.

18.

David Hilbert's funeral was attended by fewer than a dozen people, only two of whom were fellow academics, among them Arnold Sommerfeld, a theoretical physicist and a native of Konigsberg.

19.

Later, after the usefulness of David Hilbert's method was universally recognized, Gordan himself would say:.

20.

David Hilbert continued to make changes in the text and several editions appeared in German.

21.

David Hilbert's approach signaled the shift to the modern axiomatic method.

22.

The elements, such as point, line, plane, and others, could be substituted, as David Hilbert is reported to have said to Schoenflies and Kotter, by tables, chairs, glasses of beer and other such objects.

23.

David Hilbert first enumerates the undefined concepts: point, line, plane, lying on, betweenness, congruence of pairs of points, and congruence of angles.

24.

David Hilbert put forth the most influential list consisting of 23 unsolved problems at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Paris in 1900.

25.

David Hilbert presented fewer than half the problems at the Congress, which were published in the acts of the Congress.

26.

In 1920, David Hilbert proposed a research project in metamathematics that became known as David Hilbert's program.

27.

David Hilbert wanted mathematics to be formulated on a solid and complete logical foundation.

28.

David Hilbert believed that in principle this could be done by showing that:.

29.

David Hilbert seems to have had both technical and philosophical reasons for formulating this proposal.

30.

David Hilbert published his views on the foundations of mathematics in the 2-volume work, Grundlagen der Mathematik.

31.

David Hilbert's work had started logic on this course of clarification; the need to understand Godel's work then led to the development of recursion theory and then mathematical logic as an autonomous discipline in the 1930s.

32.

Around 1909, David Hilbert dedicated himself to the study of differential and integral equations; his work had direct consequences for important parts of modern functional analysis.

33.

David Hilbert spaces are an important class of objects in the area of functional analysis, particularly of the spectral theory of self-adjoint linear operators, that grew up around it during the 20th century.

34.

In 1912, three years after his friend's death, David Hilbert turned his focus to the subject almost exclusively.

35.

David Hilbert arranged to have a "physics tutor" for himself.

36.

David Hilbert started studying kinetic gas theory and moved on to elementary radiation theory and the molecular theory of matter.

37.

David Hilbert fully credited Einstein as the originator of the theory and no public priority dispute concerning the field equations ever arose between the two men during their lives.

38.

Additionally, David Hilbert's work anticipated and assisted several advances in the mathematical formulation of quantum mechanics.

39.

David Hilbert's work was a key aspect of Hermann Weyl and John von Neumann's work on the mathematical equivalence of Werner Heisenberg's matrix mechanics and Erwin Schrodinger's wave equation, and his namesake Hilbert space plays an important part in quantum theory.

40.

David Hilbert said "Physics is too hard for physicists", implying that the necessary mathematics was generally beyond them; the Courant-David Hilbert book made it easier for them.

41.

David Hilbert unified the field of algebraic number theory with his 1897 treatise Zahlbericht.

42.

David Hilbert resolved a significant number-theory problem formulated by Waring in 1770.

43.

David Hilbert then had little more to publish on the subject; but the emergence of Hilbert modular forms in the dissertation of a student means his name is further attached to a major area.

44.

David Hilbert made a series of conjectures on class field theory.

45.

David Hilbert's collected works have been published several times.