Landau

Edmund Georg Hermann Landau

Born: 14 Feb 1877 in Berlin, Germany
Died: 19 Feb 1938 in Berlin, Germany

Previous (Chronologically) Next     Biographies Index

Previous ( Alphabetically) Next          Welcome page
Edmund Landau gave the first systematic presentation of analytic number theory and wrote important works on the theory of analytic functions of a single variable.

Landau studied mathematics at the University of Berlin. His doctoral work there was supervised by Frobenius and Landau received his doctorate in 1899 for a work on number theory. Landau was always interested in mathematical puzzles and even before he received his doctorate he had published two books on mathematical problems in chess.

Landau taught at the University of Berlin from 1899 until 1909 when he was appointed to Göttingen as sucessor to Minkowski. He had Hilbert and Klein as colleagues at Göttingen until Klein retired in 1913. Landau was to remain at Göttingen until the National Socialist regime forced him out of office in 1933. After this Landau only lectured outside Germany, spending some time in Cambridge.

Landau's main work was in analytic number theory and the distribution of primes. He gave a proof of the prime number theorem in 1903 which was considerably simpler that the ones given in 1896 by Vallée Poussin and Hadamard.

His work of 1909 gave the first systematic presentation of analytic number theory. He also wrote important works on the theory of analytic functions of a single variable.

Landau wrote over 250 papers on number theory which had a major influence on the development of the subject.

References elsewhere in this archive:

Tell me about Landau's part in evaluating pi

Tell me about the Prime Number Theorem

References:

  1. Dictionary of Scientific Biography
  2. D R Heath-Brown, Edmund Landau : Collected Works, Bull. London Math. Soc. 21 (1989), 342-350.
  3. G H Hardy and H A Heilbronn, Edmund Landau, J. London Math. Soc. 13 (1938), 302-310.
  4. N Schappacher, Edmund Landau's Göttingen, Mathematical intelligencer 13 (4) (1991), 12-18. 
Previous (Chronologically) Next     Biographies Index

Previous ( Alphabetically) Next          Welcome page

History Topics Index              Famous curves index

Chronologies                           Birthplace Map

Mathematicians of the day  Anniversaries for the year

Search Form   Simple Search Form   Search Suggestions
JOC/EFR February 1996