65 Facts About Emil Artin

Emil Artin is best known for his work on algebraic number theory, contributing largely to class field theory and a new construction of L-functions.

Emil Artin contributed to the pure theories of rings, groups and fields.

Emil Artin was born in Vienna to parents Emma Maria, nee Laura, a soubrette on the operetta stages of Austria and Germany, and Emil Hadochadus Maria Artin, Austrian-born of mixed Austrian and Armenian descent.

On July 15,1907, Emil Artin's mother remarried to Rudolf Hubner: a prosperous manufacturing entrepreneur from Reichenberg, Bohemia.

In September 1907, Emil Artin entered the Volksschule in Horni Stropnice.

In Reichenberg, Emil Artin formed a lifelong friendship with a young neighbor, Arthur Baer, who became an astronomer, teaching for many years at University of Cambridge.

Emil Artin did rather better work in physics and chemistry.

Emil Artin lived that year with the family of Edmond Fritz, in the vicinity of Paris, and attended a school there.

Now that it was time to move on to university studies, Emil Artin was no doubt content to leave Reichenberg, for relations with his stepfather were clouded.

In October 1916, Emil Artin matriculated at the University of Vienna, having focused by now on mathematics.

Emil Artin studied there with Philipp Furtwangler, and took courses in astrophysics and Latin.

Studies at Vienna were interrupted when Emil Artin was drafted in June 1918 into the Austrian army.

Emil Artin did know French, of course, and some Latin, was generally a quick study, and was motivated by a highly rational fear in a theater of that war that had often proven a meat-grinder.

Emil Artin survived both war and vermin on the Italian front, and returned late in 1918 to the University of Vienna, where he remained through Easter of the following year.

Late the same year, Emil Artin undertook the formality of standing for a qualifying examination by an academic board of the Oberrealschule in Leipzig, which he passed with the grade of "gut", receiving for the second time the Reifezeugnis.

From 1919 to June 1921, Emil Artin pursued mostly mathematical studies at Leipzig.

Additionally, Emil Artin took courses in chemistry and various fields of physics, including mechanics, atomic theory, quantum theory, Maxwellian theory, radioactivity, and astrophysics.

Emil Artin played all the keyboard instruments, and was an especially accomplished flautist, although it is not known exactly by what instruction he had achieved proficiency on these instruments.

Emil Artin became especially devoted to the music of Johann Sebastian Bach.

Courant arranged for Emil Artin to receive a stipend for the summer of 1922 in Gottingen, which occasioned his declining a position offered him at the University of Kiel.

Emil Artin was promoted to full Professor on October 15,1926.

Early in the summer of 1925, Emil Artin attended the Congress of the Wandervogel youth movement at Wilhelmshausen near Kassel with the intention of gathering a congenial group to undertake a trek through Iceland later that summer.

Emil Artin succeeded in finding six young men to join him in this adventure.

Emil Artin kept a meticulous journal of this trip, making daily entries in a neat, minuscule hand.

The young men had packed guitars and violins, and Emil Artin played the harmoniums common in the isolated farmsteads where they found lodging.

Emil Artin kept up on a serious level with advances in astronomy, chemistry and biology, and the circle of his friends in Hamburg attests to the catholicity of his interests.

Stegemann was a particularly close friend, and made portraits of Emil Artin, his wife Natascha, and their two Hamburg-born children.

One of their shared interests was photography, and when Emil Artin bought a Leica for their joint use, Natascha began chronicling the life of the family, as well as the city of Hamburg.

Emil Artin, in turn, took many fine and evocative portraits of Natascha.

In 1930, Emil Artin was offered a professorship at ETH in Zurich, to replace Hermann Weyl, who had moved to Gottingen.

Still, Emil Artin's situation became increasingly precarious, not only because Natascha was of Jewish descent, but because Emil Artin made no secret of his distaste for the Hitler regime.

Natascha recalled going down to the newsstand on the corner one day and being warned in hushed tones by the man from whom she and Emil Artin bought their paper that a man had daily been watching their apartment from across the street.

Once tipped off, she and Emil Artin became very aware of the watcher, and even rather enjoyed the idea of his being forced to follow them on the long walks they loved taking in the afternoons to a cafe far out in the countryside.

Emil Artin asked his father-in-law, by then resident in Washington DC, to draft and have notarized an affidavit attesting to the Christian lineage of his late wife, Natascha's mother.

Emil Artin submitted this affidavit to the Ministry of Education, but to no avail.

Emil Artin was offered a permanent position the following year 170 miles to the south at Indiana University, in Bloomington.

For several summer semesters, Emil Artin accepted teaching positions at other universities, viz.

Emil Artin insisted that only German be spoken in the house.

Consistent with his program of maintaining the family's German cultural heritage, Emil Artin gave high priority to regularly reading German literature aloud to the children.

Emil Artin had vowed not to smoke so long as Adolf Hitler remained in power.

Emil Artin returned to heavy smoking for the rest of his life.

Emil Artin chose to teach the honors section of Freshman calculus each year.

Emil Artin was renowned for the elegance of his teaching.

Emil Artin was open to all kinds of suggestions, and distributed joyfully what he knew.

Emil Artin liked to teach, to young students, and his excellent lectures, always well prepared but without written notes, were hailed for their clarity and beauty.

Emil Artin spent weeks in the basement attempting to grind the mirror to specifications, without success, and his continued failure to get it right led to increasing frustration.

In September 1955, Emil Artin accepted an invitation to visit Japan.

Emil Artin was interested in learning about the diverse threads of Buddhism, and visiting its holy sites.

Emil Artin's letter goes on to outline at length the general eschatological framework of Buddhist belief.

Emil Artin spent the fall semester at Gottingen, and the next at Hamburg.

Emil Artin was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1957.

Emil Artin was offered a professorship at Hamburg, and at the conclusion of Princeton's spring semester, 1958, he moved permanently to Germany.

Emil Artin had no wish to retire from teaching and direct involvement with students.

In Hamburg, Emil Artin had taken an apartment, but soon gave it over to his mother whom he had brought from Vienna to live near him in Hamburg.

Emil Artin in turn moved into the apartment of the mathematician Hel Braun in the same neighborhood; though they never married, their relationship was equivalent to marriage.

Emil Artin was one of the leading algebraists of the century, with an influence larger than might be guessed from the one volume of his Collected Papers edited by Serge Lang and John Tate.

Emil Artin worked in algebraic number theory, contributing largely to class field theory and a new construction of L-functions.

Emil Artin contributed to the pure theories of rings, groups and fields.

Emil Artin developed the theory of braids as a branch of algebraic topology.

In 1955 Emil Artin was teaching foundations of geometry at New York University.

Emil Artin used his notes to publish Geometric Algebra in 1957, where he extended the material to include symplectic geometry.

Emil Artin was an important expositor of Galois theory, and of the group cohomology approach to class ring theory, to mention two theories where his formulations became standard.

Emil Artin left two conjectures, both known as Artin's conjecture.

The first concerns Emil Artin L-functions for a linear representation of a Galois group; and the second the frequency with which a given integer a is a primitive root modulo primes p, when a is fixed and p varies.

Emil Artin was not himself Jewish, but, on account of his wife's racial status in Nazi Germany, was dismissed from his university position in 1937.