Mahler

Kurt Mahler

Born: 26 July 1903 in Krefeld, Prussian Rhineland
Died: 25 Feb 1988 in Canberra, Australia

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Kurt Mahler was self-taught in mathematics while working in a factory. His father sent small articles his son had written to Klein who passed them to Siegel arranged for him to attend Frankfurt where he attended lectures by Dehn, Hellinger, Siegel and Szász.

Later at Göttingen he attended lectures by Emmy Noether, Courant, Landau, Born, Heisenberg, Hilbert and Ostrowski and acted as unpaid assistant to Norbert Wiener. Forced to leave Germany in 1933 (he was Jewish) Mahler accepted an invitation of Mordell to Manchester where he lectured until 1962 when he went to Canberra for the last 6 years of his career.

He worked on transcendence of numbers, showing in 1946 that

0.123456789101112131415161718192021...

was transcendental. Other major themes of his work were p-adic numbers, geometry of numbers (a term coined by Minkowski) and measure on polynomials.

References:

  1. 1. Obituary Kurt Mahler, Bull. London Math. Soc. 24 (1992), 381-397.
  2. K Mahler, Fifty years as a mathematician, J. Number Theory 14 (1982), 121-155.
  3. J H Cotes and A J Van der Porten, Kurt Mahler 1903-1988, Historical Records of Australian Science 9 (1993), 369-385. 
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