Tombstone of Ernst Steinitz. Jewish cemetery in Wroclaw (street Lotnicza).

Ernst Steinitz (June 13, 1871 – September 29, 1928) was a German mathematician.

[edit] Biography

Steinitz was born in Laurahütte (Siemianowice Śląskie), Silesia, Germany (now in Poland), the son of Sigismund Steinitz, a Jewish coal merchant, and his wife Auguste Cohen; he had two brothers. He studied at the University of Breslau and the University of Berlin, receiving his Ph.D. from Breslau in 1894. Subsequently, he took positions at Charlottenberg (now the Technical University of Berlin), Breslau, and the University of Kiel, Germany, where he died in 1928. Steinitz married Martha Steinitz and had one son.

[edit] Mathematical works

Steinitz's 1894 thesis was on the subject of projective configurations; it contained the result that any abstract description of a incidence structure of three lines per point and three points per line could be realized as a configuration of straight lines in the Euclidean plane with the possible exception of one of the lines. His thesis contains the proof of König's theorem for regular bipartite graphs. In 1910 Steinitz published the very influential paper Algebraische Theorie der Körper (German: Algebraic Theory of Fields, Crelle's Journal (1910), 167–309). In this paper he axiomatically studies the properties of fields and defines important concepts like prime field, perfect field and the transcendence degree of an field extension. Steinitz proved that every field has an algebraic closure. He also made fundamental contributions to the theory of polyhedra: Steinitz's theorem for polyhedra is that the 1-skeletons of convex polyhedra are exactly the 3-connected planar graphs. His work in this area was published posthumously as a 1934 book, Vorlesungen über die Theorie der Polyeder unter Einschluss der Elemente der Topologie, by Hans Rademacher.

[edit] See also

• Steinitz exchange lemma

[edit] References

• O'Connor, John J.; Robertson, Edmund F., "Ernst Steinitz", MacTutor History of Mathematics archive, http://www-history.mcs.st-andrews.ac.uk/Biographies/Steinitz.html .
• Ernst Steinitz at the Mathematics Genealogy Project
• Gropp, Harald, F.W. Levi (1888–1966) and E. Steinitz (1871–1928), Posters shown at 1998 International Congress of Mathematicians, Berlin, and again at the 6th Slovenian International Conference on Graph Theory, Bled'07 .
• Röhl, H. (1962), Ernst Steinitz, eine Darstellung seines mathematischen Werkes, Staatsexamenarbeit Keil . As cited by Gropp.

This article about a German mathematician is a stub. You can help Wikipedia by expanding it. v • d • e