Name Helmuth Gericke | Books Lattice theory | |
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Born May 7, 1909
Aachen ( 1909-05-07 ) Thesis Uber den Volta-Effekt (1932) Died August 15, 2007, Freiburg im Breisgau, Germany | ||
Paul Fritz Helmuth Gericke (1909 – 2007) was a German mathematician and an historian of mathematics.
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Life
Gericke was born in Aachen on 7 May 1909. From 1926 to 1931 he studied physics and mathematics at the universities of Greifswald, Marburg and Göttingen. In 1931, he obtained his doctorate with a thesis on the Volta effect. In 1934, he was an assistant to Wilhelm Süss in Freiburg. With Süss, he attained his habilitation in pure mathematics in 1941. After 1945, he helped Süss to further develop the Mathematical Research Institute Oberwolfach. His interest in the history of mathematics was aroused by the work of Joseph Ehrenfried Hofmann, whom he had met in Oberwolfach in 1945 and 1946. In 1947, he began to hold lectures in Freiburg on topics related to the history of mathematics. He also received support from Heinrich Behnke, which enabled him to publish his work.
In 1952 he was appointed associate professor at the University of Freiburg. He took a professorship at the University of Munich in 1963, where he was appointed as the first Professor of the History of Science. There he founded the Institute for the History of Science. In 1964, against his stated will, he was chosen as deputy chairman of the German Society for the History of Medicine, Science and Technology. In 1977, he became Professor Emeritus. He began his professional career working on differential geometry and the body of complex numbers, but from 1947 he devoted himself to subjects in the history of mathematics, publishing several books in this field. His focus was on the development of mathematics in ancient Greece and the mathematics of the 19th century.
He died in Freiburg on 15 August 2007 at the age of 98.