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Paul Albert Gordan

Paul Albert Gordan (27 April 1837 – 21 December 1912) was a German mathematician, a student of Carl Jacobi at the University of Königsberg before obtaining his Ph.D. at the University of Breslau (1862),^[1] and a professor at the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg.

He was known as "the king of invariant theory".^[2]^[3] His most famous result is that the ring of invariants of binary forms of fixed degree is finitely generated.^[3] He and Alfred Clebsch gave their name to Clebsch-Gordan coefficients. Gordan also served as the thesis advisor for Emmy Noether.^[1]

Gordan initially rejected David Hilbert's proof of the Hilbert Basis Theorem, a result which vastly generalized his result on invariants, saying "This is not mathematics; this is theology."^[4]^[2] The proof in question was the (non-constructive) existence of a finite basis for invariants. This proof seemed to counter the sensibilities of Gordan, whom Weyl described in his Hilbert obituary as a great "algorithmician."

He was born in Breslau, Germany (now Wrocław Poland), and died in Erlangen, Germany.

[edit] Notes

^ ^a ^b O'Connor, John J.; Robertson, Edmund F., "Paul Albert Gordan", MacTutor History of Mathematics archive, http://www-history.mcs.st-andrews.ac.uk/Biographies/Gordan.html ..
^ ^a ^b Harm Derksen, Gregor Kemper. (2002), Derkson, Harm; Kemper, Gregor, eds., Computational Invariant Theory, Invariant theory and algebraic transformation groups, Springer-Verlag, p. 49, ISBN 3540434763, OCLC 49493513 .
^ ^a ^b edited by A.N. Kolmogorov, A.P. Yushkevich ; translated from the Russian by A. Shenitzer, H. Grant and O.B. Sheinin. (2001), Kolmogorov, A. N.; Yushkevich, A. P., eds., Mathematics of the 19th Century: Mathematical Logic, Algebra, Number Theory, Probability Theory, Springer-Verlag, p. 85, ISBN 3764364424, OCLC 174767718 .
^ Hermann Weyl, David Hilbert. 1862-1943, Obituary Notices of Fellows of the Royal Society (1944).

[edit] References

Noether, Max (1914), "Paul Gordan", Mathematische Annalen 75 (1): 1–41, doi:10.1007/BF01564521 .

[edit] External links

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[mg-0] O'Connor, John J.; Robertson, Edmund F., "Paul Albert Gordan", MacTutor History of Mathematics archive, http://www-history.mcs.st-andrews.ac.uk/Biographies/Gordan.html ..

[itatg-1] Harm Derksen, Gregor Kemper. (2002), Derkson, Harm; Kemper, Gregor, eds., Computational Invariant Theory, Invariant theory and algebraic transformation groups, Springer-Verlag, p. 49, ISBN 3540434763, OCLC 49493513 .

[m19c-2] ted by A.N. Kolmogorov, A.P. Yushkevich ; translated from the Russian by A. Shenitzer, H. Grant and O.B. Sheinin. (2001), Kolmogorov, A. N.; Yushkevich, A. P., eds., Mathematics of the 19th Century: Mathematical Logic, Algebra, Number Theory, Probability Theory, Springer-Verlag, p. 85, ISBN 3764364424, OCLC 174767718 .

[3] Hermann Weyl, David Hilbert. 1862-1943, Obituary Notices of Fellows of the Royal Society (1944).

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