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Concept
Friedrich Hirzebruch
Summary
Friedrich Ernst Peter Hirzebruch ForMemRS (17 October 1927 – 27 May 2012) was a German mathematician, working in the fields of topology, complex manifolds and algebraic geometry, and a leading figure in his generation. He has been described as "the most important mathematician in Germany of the postwar period."
Hirzebruch was born in Hamm, Westphalia in 1927.
His father of the same name was a maths teacher.
Hirzebruch studied at the University of Münster from 1945–1950, with one year at ETH Zürich.
Hirzebruch then held a position at Erlangen, followed by the years 1952–54 at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey. After one year at Princeton University 1955–56, he was made a professor at the University of Bonn, where he remained, becoming director of the Max-Planck-Institut für Mathematik in 1981.
More than 300 people gathered in celebration of his 80th birthday in Bonn in 2007.
The Hirzebruch–Riemann–Roch theorem (1954) for complex manifolds was a major advance and quickly became part of the mainstream developments around the classical Riemann–Roch theorem;
it was also a precursor of the Atiyah–Singer index theorem and Grothendieck's powerful generalisation.
Hirzebruch's book Neue topologische Methoden in der algebraischen Geometrie (1956) was a basic text for the 'new methods' of sheaf theory, in complex algebraic geometry.
He 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. In his later work he provided a detailed theory of Hilbert modular surfaces, with Don Zagier. He even found connections between the Dedekind sum in number theory and differential topology, one of the many discoveries found between these different fields. His work influenced a generation of prominent mathematicians like Kunihiko Kodaira, John Milnor, Borel, Atiyah, Raoul Bott and Jean-Pierre Serre.
In March 1945, 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.
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