Biography:Stefan Cohn-Vossen

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Stefan Cohn-Vossen
in Moscow, probably 1936
Born(1902-05-28)28 May 1902
Breslau, Silesia
Died25 June 1936(1936-06-25) (aged 34)
Moscow, Soviet Union
Alma materWrocław University
Known forCohn-Vossen's inequality
Scientific career
FieldsMathematics
ThesisSinguläre Punkte reeller, schlichter Kurvenscharen, deren Differentialgleichung gegeben ist (1924)
Doctoral advisorAdolf Kneser

Stefan Cohn-Vossen (28 May 1902 – 25 June 1936) was a mathematician, specializing in differential geometry. He is best known for his collaboration with David Hilbert on the 1932 book Anschauliche Geometrie, translated into English as Geometry and the Imagination.[1] Both Cohn-Vossen's inequality and the Cohn-Vossen transformation are named after him.[2] He also proved the first version of the splitting theorem.

Biography

Stefan Cohn-Vossen was born 28 May, 1902 to Emanuel Cohn, a lawyer, and Hedwig (née Vossen) in Breslau (then a city in the Kingdom of Prussia; now Wrocław in Poland). He attended Göttingen in 1920; his notes from Hilbert's lectures on geometry at that time would form the basis for Anschauliche Geometrie. He wrote a 1924 doctoral dissertation at the University of Breslau (now the University of Wrocław) under the supervision of Adolf Kneser.[3] In 1929 he completed his habilitation at Göttingen with his thesis Non-rigid closed surfaces[4] under Richard Courant.[5]

Cohn-Vossen became a professor at the University of Cologne in 1930.[6] In 1931, Cohn-Vossen married Dr. Margot Maria Elfriede Ranft. Anschauliche Geometrie was published in 1932; the book was well reviewed[7][8] and by association with Hilbert, Cohn-Vossen became well known.[9] He was barred from lecturing in 1933 under Nazi racial legislation, because he was Jewish.[10]

Unable to work in Germany, Cohn-Vossen moved to Switzerland in 1934, first to Locarno and then to Zurich, where he taught gymnasium. His son, Richard Cohn-Vossen (de), was born in Zurich in September 1934. Both Courant and Karl Löwner recommended Cohn-Vossen for positions abroad, at Istanbul and Dartmouth respectively; ultimately he emigrated to the USSR, with support from Herman Müntz, Fritz Houtermans, Pavel Alexandrov, and Heinz Hopf,[11] where he was appointed to the Academy of Sciences and worked at Leningrad State University and the Steklov Institute.[12][13]

Cohn-Vossen died in Moscow from pneumonia in 1936.[14] Despite his short time in the USSR, Cohn-Vossen had a significant impact on the development of differential geometry "in the large"[15] in Soviet mathematics.[16][17][18]

Following Cohn-Vossen's death, his widow, Dr. Elfriede Cohn-Vossen, remarried Alfred Kurella, returned to Germany in 1954, and died in 1957. His son, Richard, became a filmmaker. In 1946, unaware of his death, the University of Cologne offered Cohn-Vossen his professorship back.[19]

Publications

Books

  • Cohn-Vossen, S. E. (Кон-Фоссен С. Э.) (1959) (in ru). Некоторые вопросы дифференциальной геометрии в целом. Moscow: Fizmatgiz. 

Articles

  • "Die parabolische Kurve. Beitrag zur Geometrie der Berührungstransformationen, der partiellen Differentialgleichung zweiter Ordnung und der Flächenverbiegung". Math. Ann. 99: 273–308. 1928. doi:10.1007/BF01459097. 
  • "Sur la courbure totale des surfaces ouvertes" (in fr). C. R. Acad. Sci. Paris 197: 1165–1167. 1933. 
  • "Die Kollineationen desn-dimensionalen Raumes" (in de). Math. Ann. 115: 80–86. 1938. doi:10.1007/BF01448928. 

See also

References

  1. ↑ Hilbert, David; Cohn-Vossen, Stephan (1952). Geometry and the Imagination (2nd ed.). Chelsea. ISBN 0-8284-1087-9. https://archive.org/details/geometryimaginat00davi_0. 
  2. ↑ Hazewinkel, Michiel, ed. (2001), "Cohn-Vossen transformation", Encyclopedia of Mathematics, Springer Science+Business Media B.V. / Kluwer Academic Publishers, ISBN 978-1-55608-010-4, https://www.encyclopediaofmath.org/index.php?title=Cohn-Vossen_transformation 
  3. ↑ Stefan Cohn-Vossen at the Mathematics Genealogy Project
  4. ↑ Cohn-Vossen 1930.
  5. ↑ "Universität zu Köln - Stefan Cohn-Vossen". https://professorenkatalog.uni-koeln.de/person/show/143. 
  6. ↑ Stefan Cohn-Vossen - Erinnerungskolloquium, Universität zu Köln, 7 November 2014, https://www.mi.uni-koeln.de/Geschichte/COHN-VOSSEN,Stefan/docs/Joint_Presentation_Cohn-Vossen.pdf 
  7. ↑ Herbert Turnbull (1933), "Review of Anschauliche Geometrie", Mathematical Gazette 17 (225): 277-280 
  8. ↑ "MacTutor - Reviews of David Hilbert's books". https://mathshistory.st-andrews.ac.uk/Extras/Hilbert_books/#5. 
  9. ↑ "MacTutor - Stefan Emmanuilovich Cohn-Vossen". https://mathshistory.st-andrews.ac.uk/Biographies/Cohn-Vossen/. 
  10. ↑ Siegmund-Schultze, Reinhard (2009), Mathematicians Fleeing from Nazi Germany: Individual Fates and Global Impact, Princeton University Press, pp. 132, 133, 346, 370, 373, 399, ISBN 9780691140414 .
  11. ↑ Siegmund-Schultze 2009 (p.133) quotes from a 1937 letter by Müntz: "The appointments of Cohn-Vossen, Walfisz, Pollaczek (the latter was not allowed to slip in again) were immediately influenced by myself, the ones for Plessner and Bergmann indirectly."
  12. ↑ Pasha Zusmanovich (2024). "Mathematicians going East". Journal of Humanistic Mathematics 14 (1). 
  13. ↑ "On the works of S.E. Cohn-Vossen". Uspekhi Matematicheskikh Nauk 3 (19). 1947. 
  14. ↑ Cohn-Vossen's Obituary (in Russian)
  15. ↑ Hazewinkel, Michiel, ed. (2001), "Geometry in the large", Encyclopedia of Mathematics, Springer Science+Business Media B.V. / Kluwer Academic Publishers, ISBN 978-1-55608-010-4, https://www.encyclopediaofmath.org/index.php?title=Geometry_in_the_large 
  16. ↑ Alexandrov 1947.
  17. ↑ N.V. Efimov (1957). Flachenverbiegung im Grossen. Berlin: Akadamie. 
  18. ↑ Cohn-Vossen 1959.
  19. ↑ Stefan Cohn-Vossen, Erinnerungskolloquium 2014.



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