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Edmund LandauGerman mathematician
Date of Birth: 14.02.1877
Country:  Germany |
Content:
Biography of Edmund Landau
Edmund Landau was a German mathematician of Jewish descent who made significant contributions to number theory, with over 250 published works. He was born into a prosperous family in Berlin, with his mother coming from the renowned banking house Jakobi. Landau studied at the French Lycée in Berlin until the age of 16, graduating two years ahead of schedule. In 1899, under the guidance of Frobenius, he prepared and defended his dissertation on number theory, after which he became an associate professor at the University of Berlin. During this time, he also published two collections of mathematical puzzles related to chess.
Contributions to Number Theory
In 1901, Landau defended his habilitation thesis on Dirichlet series in analytical number theory. In 1905, he married Marianne Ehrlich, the daughter of Nobel laureate Paul Ehrlich. In 1909, following the death of Minkowski, Landau succeeded him as a professor of mathematics at the University of Göttingen. He remained there until 1934 when the Nazi regime began a campaign to remove non-Aryan elements from the university. In the late 1920s, Landau visited Palestine and was elected as a professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He participated in the establishment of the Institute of Mathematics and delivered a series of lectures there.
In 1934, under pressure from the Nazis, Landau was forced to retire. However, he chose not to leave Germany and continued to live in Berlin. He passed away in 1938 from a heart attack.
Major Discoveries and Achievements
Landau's most famous students were P. Bernays, H. Bohr, and K. Siegel. His main contributions were in the study of prime number distribution. In 1909, he published a two-volume monograph that provided the first systematic exposition of this theory. Landau was able to establish a connection between the distribution of prime numbers and the distribution of prime ideals in an algebraic number field.
In 1912, Landau presented four important but unsolved problems in number theory at the Fifth International Congress of Mathematicians held in Cambridge, where he was elected as the chairman. To this day, none of these problems has been solved.
Landau also achieved significant results in complex analysis and the foundations of mathematics. In 1930, he published the book "Grundlagen der Analysis" (Foundations of Analysis), which is considered a classic exposition of the subject. He also has a theorem named after him regarding the singular points of entire functions. In 1924, Landau was elected as an honorary member of the London Mathematical Society.
He was a foreign member of many European academies, including being a corresponding member of the Russian Academy of Sciences (1924) and an honorary foreign member of the USSR Academy of Sciences (1932).
