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Max Wilhelm Dehn (November 13, 1878 – June 27, 1952) was a German mathematician most famous for his work in geometry, topology and geometric group theory. Dehn's early life and career took place in Germany. However, he was forced to retire in 1935 and eventually fled Germany in 1939 and emigrated to the United States. Dehn was a student of David Hilbert, and in his habilitation in 1900 Dehn resolved Hilbert's third problem, making him the first to resolve one of Hilbert's well-known 23 problems. Dehn's students include Ott-Heinrich Keller, Ruth Moufang, Wilhelm Magnus, and the artists Dorothea Rockburne and Ruth Asawa. Dehn was born to a family of Jewish origin in Hamburg, Imperial Germany. He studied the foundations of geometry with Hilbert at Göttingen in 1899, and obtained a proof of the Jordan curve theorem for polygons. In 1900 he wrote his dissertation on the role of the Legendre angle sum theorem in axiomatic geometry. From 1900 to 1911 he was an employee and researcher at the University of Münster. In his habilitation at the University of Münster in 1900 he resolved Hilbert's third problem, by introducing what was afterwards called the Dehn invariant. This was the first resolution of one of the Hilbert Problems. Dehn's interests later turned to topology and combinatorial group theory. In 1907 he wrote with Poul Heegaard the first book on the foundations of combinatorial topology, then known as analysis situs. Also in 1907, he described the construction of a new homology sphere. In 1908 he believed that he had found a proof of the Poincaré conjecture, but Tietze found an error. In 1910 Dehn published a paper on three-dimensional topology in which he introduced Dehn surgery and used it to construct homology spheres. He also stated Dehn's lemma, but an error was found in his proof by Hellmuth Kneser in 1929. The result was proved in 1957 by Christos Papakyriakopoulos. The word problem for groups, also called the Dehn problem, was posed by him in 1911. Dehn married Antonie Landau on August 23, 1912.

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Related concepts (19)

Word problem for groups

In mathematics, especially in the area of abstract algebra known as combinatorial group theory, the word problem for a finitely generated group G is the algorithmic problem of deciding whether two words in the generators represent the same element. More precisely, if A is a finite set of generators for G then the word problem is the membership problem for the formal language of all words in A and a formal set of inverses that map to the identity under the natural map from the free monoid with involution on A to the group G.

Max Dehn

Dehn invariant

In geometry, the Dehn invariant is a value used to determine whether one polyhedron can be cut into pieces and reassembled ("dissected") into another, and whether a polyhedron or its dissections can tile space. It is named after Max Dehn, who used it to solve Hilbert's third problem by proving that not all polyhedra with equal volume could be dissected into each other. Two polyhedra have a dissection into polyhedral pieces that can be reassembled into either one, if and only if their volumes and Dehn invariants are equal.