Baer

Reinhold Baer

Born: 22 July 1902 in Berlin, Germany
Died: 22 Oct 1979 in Zurich, Switzerland

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Baer studyied mechanical engineering for a yearand then changed to mathematics and philosophy at Freiburg in 1921 where Krull and Loewy were on the staff. He went to Göttingen in 1922 and was influenced by Emmy Noether and Kneser who supervised Baer's doctoral thesis on the classification of curves on surfaces. He worked at Kiel for a year with Hasse, Steinitz and Toeplitz.

A post at Freiburg was followed with one at Halle but, while he was on holiday, Hitler came to power and Baer was informed that his services at Halle were no longer required. He then accepted an invitation from Mordell to go to Manchester, and after going to Oxford to meet Weyl, he accepted his invitation to Princeton. Baer taught at various places in the USA until 1956 when he returned to Frankfurt in Germany where Moufang held a senior position.

His mathematical work was wide ranging, topology, abelian groups and geometry. His most important work, however, was in group theory, on the extension problem for groups, finiteness conditions, soluble and nilpotent groups.

References:

  1. 1. Reinhold Baer, Bull. London Math. Soc. 13 (1981), 339-361.
  2. O H Kegel, Obituary : Reinhold Baer (1902-1979), Mathematical Intelligencer 2 (1980), 181-182. 
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