Nationality German | Role Mathematician Name Kurt Hensel | |
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Born Kurt Wilhelm Sebastian Hensel29 December 1861Konigsberg, Prussia (present-day Kaliningrad, Russia) ( 1861-12-29 ) Similar People Helmut Hasse, Leopold Kronecker, Alexander Ostrowski, Edmund Landau, Felix Klein | ||
Kurt Wilhelm Sebastian Hensel (29 December 1861 – 1 June 1941) was a German mathematician born in Königsberg.
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Life and career
Hensel was born in Königsberg, East Prussia (today Kaliningrad, Russia), the son of Julia (née von Adelson) and Sebastian Ludwig Felix Hensel, who was a landowner and entrepreneur. His paternal grandparents were painter Wilhelm Hensel and composer Fanny Mendelssohn. Through his grandmother, he was a descendant of the philosopher Moses Mendelssohn. Hensel was the brother of the philosopher Paul Hensel. Both his paternal grandmother and his mother were from Jewish families that had converted to Christianity.
Hensel studied mathematics in Berlin and Bonn, under the mathematicians Leopold Kronecker and Karl Weierstrass.
Later in his life Hensel was a professor at the University of Marburg until 1930. He was also an editor of the mathematical Crelle's Journal. He edited the five-volume collected works of Leopold Kronecker.
Hensel is well known for his introduction of p-adic numbers. First described by him in 1897, they became increasingly important in number theory and other fields during the twentieth century.