1. Karl Theodor Vahlen was a German mathematician and leading representative of National Socialist German mathematics.
25 Facts About Theodor Vahlen
1. 2.
Theodore Vahlen was born in Vienna, the son of a German classical philologist Johannes Vahlen.
3.
Theodor Vahlen went to volksschule and gymnasium in Berlin before studying mathematics at the University of Berlin and receiving his doctorate there in 1893.
4.
From 1893, Vahlen was a Privatdozent in mathematics at the Konigsberg Albertina University.
5.
Theodor Vahlen entered military service at the beginning of World War I with the rank of Hauptmann in the 68th Field Artillery Regiment.
6.
Theodor Vahlen was an artillery battery commander on the western front and the eastern front.
7.
Theodor Vahlen left the service on 30 September 1918 with the rank of Major of the reserves.
8.
Theodor Vahlen returned to teaching at the University of Greifswald.
9.
Theodor Vahlen co-founded a volkische group in Pomerania in 1922.
10.
Theodor Vahlen then joined the National Socialist Freedom Party, a Nazi front organization, becoming its Gauleiter in Pomerania on 4 April 1924.
11.
In December 1925, Theodor Vahlen joined the National Socialist Working Association, a group of north and northwest German Gauleiters closely associated with Strasser.
12.
On 1 March 1926, Theodor Vahlen joined Strasser and his brother Otto Strasser in founding the publishing house Kampf-Verlag in Berlin.
13.
Consequently, Theodor Vahlen was placed on indefinite leave on 1 May 1927 and his newly appointed Deputy, Walther von Corswant, was effectively put in charge.
14.
Also in May 1927, Theodor Vahlen faced disciplinary actions stemming from an incident a few years earlier when he was Rector at the University of Greifswald.
15.
On 11 August 1924, Constitution Day, Theodor Vahlen had incited a crowd at the university against the Weimar Republic, which resulted in taking down the flags of the Republic and the Free State of Prussia.
16.
Theodor Vahlen worked briefly as an assistant in Johannes Stark's private physics laboratory.
17.
In 1930 Theodor Vahlen returned to his birthplace and became a lecturer of mathematics at the Technische Hochschule Wien.
18.
In July 1933 Theodor Vahlen joined the Sturmabteilung but on 10 July 1936 he switched to the Schutzstaffel with the rank of Sturmbannfuhrer and was assigned to the SS Main Office.
19.
Theodor Vahlen received successive promotions, the last being to SS-Brigadefuhrer on 9 November 1943.
20.
Theodor Vahlen was head of WI, but, in actuality, the deputy chief, the chemist Franz Bacher ran WI.
21.
From this position, in 1936, Theodor 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.
22.
On 1 January 1937 Theodor Vahlen was relieved of his duties at the Ministry at his own request.
23.
Theodor Vahlen gained his doctorate with Beitrage zu einer additiven Zahlentheorie, and continued to specialise in number theory, but later turned to applied mathematics.
24.
Since Theodor Vahlen explores some of the fractional-linear transformations of Clifford algebras, he is sometimes remembered for the Theodor Vahlen matrices.
25.
Theodor Vahlen's motivation was to unify the theory of motions in Euclidean, hyperbolic, and elliptic space, which is obviously in the spirit of Clifford.