Siegel

Carl Ludwig Siegel

Born: 31 Dec 1896 in Berlin, Germany
Died: 4 April 1981 in Göttingen, Germany

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Siegel attended lectures by Frobenius then wrote a dissertation at Göttingen supervised by Landau. He was professor at Frankfurt from 1922 to 1937 and Göttingen from 1938 to 1940. After this he worked at Princeton until 1951 when he returned to Göttingen.

Siegel worked on the theory of numbers where he held an eminent role. He extended results of Fermat by proving that

if P(x) is a polynomial with integer coefficients, the Diophantine equation y = P(x) has at most a finite number of integer solutions x, y if P(x) has at least three distinct linear factors.

Siegel obtained results on quadratic forms building on the work of Lagrange, Gauss, Eisenstein and Hermite. He inaugurated the general theory of automorphic functions of several complex variables, building on the work of Poincaré.

The second reference below describes Siegel's work in celestial mechanics.

References:

  1. Dictionary of Scientific Biography
  2. Carl Ludwig Siegel Gesammelte Abhandlungen (Berlin-New York, 1966).
  3. H Rüssmann, Das Werk C L Siegels in der Himmelsmechanik, Jahresberichte der Deutschen Mathematiker vereinigung 85 (1983), 174-200. 
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