16 Facts About Friedrich Hirzebruch

Friedrich Ernst Peter Hirzebruch ForMemRS was a German mathematician, working in the fields of topology, complex manifolds and algebraic geometry, and a leading figure in his generation.

Friedrich Hirzebruch's father, of the same name, was a maths teacher.

Friedrich Hirzebruch's book Neue topologische Methoden in der algebraischen Geometrie was a basic text for the 'new methods' of sheaf theory, in complex algebraic geometry.

Friedrich Hirzebruch went on to write the foundational papers on topological K-theory with Michael Atiyah, and collaborated with Armand Borel on the theory of characteristic classes.

Friedrich Hirzebruch even found connections between the Dedekind sum in number theory and differential topology, one of the many discoveries found between these different fields.

Friedrich Hirzebruch's work influenced a generation of prominent mathematicians like Kunihiko Kodaira, John Milnor, Borel, Atiyah, Raoul Bott and Jean-Pierre Serre.

In March 1945, Friedrich Hirzebruch became a soldier, and in April, in the last weeks of Hitler's rule, he was taken prisoner by the British forces then invading Germany from the west.

Friedrich Hirzebruch is famous for organizing the Mathematische Arbeitstagung in Bonn University, beginning in 1957, and the first speakers include Atiyah, Jacques Tits, Alexander Grothendieck, Hans Grauert, Nicolaas Kuiper, and Friedrich Hirzebruch himself.

Friedrich Hirzebruch established the Max Planck Institute for Mathematics at Bonn in 1980.

The institute became the place for the Arbeitstagung and Friedrich Hirzebruch was its director until 1995.

Amongst many other honours, Friedrich Hirzebruch was awarded the Wolf Prize in Mathematics in 1988 and a Lobachevsky Medal in 1989.

Friedrich Hirzebruch won an Einstein Medal of the Albert Einstein Society in Bern in 1999, and received the Cantor medal in 2004.

Friedrich Hirzebruch was a foreign member of numerous academies and societies, including the United States National Academy of Sciences, the Russian Academy of Sciences, the Royal Society and the French Academy of Sciences.

Friedrich Hirzebruch was a member of academies of Russia, Poland, Ukraine, Israel, Finland, Hungary, Netherlands, Gottingen, Austria, and Ireland as well as the Academia Europaea and the European Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Friedrich Hirzebruch was the president of the German Mathematical Society in 1962 and 1990, first after the foundation of a separate Eastern German mathematical due to the German division, and then again after the collapse of the wall which led to the unification of the East and West German Mathematical societies.

Friedrich Hirzebruch was the first President of the European Mathematical Society from 1990 to 1994.