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Reinhold Baer

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Nationality
  
German

Doctoral advisor
  
Hellmuth Kneser

Fields
  
Mathematics

Role
  
Mathematician

Name
  
Reinhold Baer


Reinhold Baer httpsuploadwikimediaorgwikipediacommonsdd

Born
  
22 July 1902 Berlin, Germany (
1902-07-22
)

Institutions
  
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Goethe University Frankfurt

Alma mater
  
University of Gottingen

Doctoral students
  
Bernd Fischer Hermann Heineken Heinrich Luneburg Gerhard Michler Wolfgang Kappe Grace Bates Kenneth Graham Wolfson

Died
  
October 22, 1979, Zurich, Switzerland

Books
  
Linear algebra and projective geometry

Education
  
Leibniz University of Hanover, University of Gottingen

Reinhold Baer (22 July 1902 – 22 October 1979) was a German mathematician, known for his work in algebra. He introduced injective modules in 1940. He is the eponym of Baer rings and Baer groups.

Biography

Baer studied mechanical engineering for a year at the University of Hanover. He then went to study philosophy at Freiburg in 1921. While he was at Göttingen in 1922 he was influenced by Emmy Noether and Hellmuth Kneser. In 1924 he won a scholarship for specially gifted students. Baer wrote up his doctoral dissertation and it was published in Crelle's Journal in 1927.

Baer accepted a post at Halle in 1928. There, he published Ernst Steinitz's "Algebraische Theorie der Körper" with Helmut Hasse, first published in Crelle's Journal in 1910.

While Baer was with his wife in Austria, Adolf Hitler and the Nazis came into power. Baer was later informed that his services at Halle were no longer required. Louis Mordell invited him to go to Manchester and Baer accepted.

Baer stayed at Princeton University and was a visiting scholar at the nearby Institute for Advanced Study from 1935 to 1937. For a short while he lived in North Carolina. From 1938 to 1956 he worked at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He returned to Germany in 1956.

According to biographer K. W. Gruenberg,

The rapid development of lattice theory in the mid-thirties suggested that projective geometry should be viewed as a special kind of lattice, the lattice of all subspaces of a vector space... [Linear Algebra and Projective Geometry (1952)] is an account of the representation of vector spaces over division rings, of projectivities by semi-linear transformations and of dualities by semi-bilinear forms.

References

Reinhold Baer Wikipedia