Biography:Winfried Scharlau

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Short description: German mathematician (1940–2020)
Winfried Scharlau in 2006.

Winfried Scharlau (12 August 1940, in Berlin – 26 November 2020) was a German mathematician.

Biography

Scharlau received his doctorate in 1967 from the University of Bonn. His doctoral thesis Quadratische Formen und Galois-Cohomologie (Quadratic Forms and Galois Cohomology) was supervised by Friedrich Hirzebruch.[1][2] Scharlau was at the Institute for Advanced Study for the academic year 1969–1970 and in spring 1972.[3] From 1970 he was a professor (most recently Institutsdirektor) at the University of Münster, where he has now retired.

Scharlau's research deals with number theory and, in particular, the theory of quadratic forms, about which he wrote a 1985 monograph Quadratic and Hermitian Forms in Springer's series Grundlehren der mathematischen Wissenschaften.[4][5]

Scharlau was also an amateur ornithologist and author of two novels, I megali istoria - die große Geschichte (2nd edition 2001), set on the Greek island of Naxos, and Scharife (2001), set on the island of Zanzibar in the 19th century.[6] He also deals with the history of mathematics and wrote, with Hans Opolka,[7] a historically-oriented introduction to number theory. Their book presents, among other topics, the analytical class number formula of Dirichlet and the geometry of the numbers in the 19th century.[8] Scharlau wrote a multi-part biography of Alexander Grothendieck.[6]

Scharlau was a corresponding member of the Göttingen Academy of Sciences and Humanities. From 1991 to 1992 he was president of the German Mathematical Society. In 1974 he was invited speaker with talk On subspaces of inner product spaces at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Vancouver .[9]

He was the father of the cognitive psychologist Ingrid Scharlau.[10]

Selected publications

References

  1. Winfried Scharlau at the Mathematics Genealogy Project
  2. Scharlau, Winfried (1967). "Quadratische Formen und Galois-Cohomologie". Inventiones Mathematicae 4 (4): 238–264. doi:10.1007/BF01425383. ISSN 0020-9910. Bibcode1967InMat...4..238S. 
  3. "Winfried Scharlau". 9 December 2019. https://www.ias.edu/scholars/winfried-scharlau. 
  4. Scharlau, W. (6 December 2012). Quadratic and Hermitian Forms. Springer Science & Business Media. ISBN 978-3-642-69971-9. https://books.google.com/books?id=c27pCAAAQBAJ; pbk reprint of 1985 original 
  5. Lam, T. Y. (1989). "Book Review: Quadratic and Hermitian forms by Winfried Scharlau". Bulletin of the American Mathematical Society 21 (1): 121–126. doi:10.1090/S0273-0979-1989-15785-6. ISSN 0273-0979. 
  6. 6.0 6.1 "Buchpublikation von Scharlau". 2 May 2023. http://www.scharlau-online.de/publikationen.html. 
  7. Hans Opolka (b. 1949) is a German professor of mathematics, specializing in algebra and number theory. Hans Opolka at the Mathematics Genealogy Project
  8. Scharlau, W.; Opolka, H. (9 March 2013). From Fermat to Minkowski: Lectures on the Theory of Numbers and Its Historical Development. Springer Science & Business Media. ISBN 978-1-4757-1867-6. https://books.google.com/books?id=nOXgBwAAQBAJ; pbk reprint of 1985 translation of the 1980 German original 
  9. Scharlau, W. (1975). "On subspaces of inner product spaces". Proceedings of the International Congress of Mathematicians. I. pp. 331–335. 
  10. "Winfried Scharlau im Internet". http://www.scharlau-online.de/. 

External links