Reinhard Siegmund-Schultze (born 2 April 1953 in Halle (Saale)) is a German historian of mathematics.
Biography Siegmund-Schultze studied mathematics at the Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg, where he received his doctorate in 1979 on the history of functional analysis. He wrote his doctoral thesis between 1975 and 1978 during research studies at the Karl-Sudhoff-Institut für Geschichte der Medizin und der Naturwissenschaften (Karl Sudhoff Institute for the History of Medicine and Natural Sciences) at the Leipzig University. He then worked until 1990 as an assistant at the Humboldt University of Berlin, where he completed his habilitation in 1987 ("Contributions to the analysis of the development conditions of mathematics in fascist Germany with special consideration of the reviewing system"). (in Norwegian)Mathematische Berichterstattung in Hitlerdeutschland: der Niedergang des "Jahrbuchs über die Fortschritte der Mathematik, Göttingen, Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht 1993 (aus der Habilitation entstanden) From 1991 to 1994 he was a Feodor Lynen research fellow at the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation in the USA. Since 2000 he has been a professor of history of science at the University of Agder in Kristiansand, Norway.
Siegmund-Schultze is known for historical work on the unfortunate circumstances and emigration of mathematicians from National Socialist Germany.Mathematiker auf der Flucht vor Hitler. Quellen und Studien zur Emigration einer Wissenschaft, Vieweg: Braunschweig 1998; in an expanded version in English translation: Mathematicians fleeing from Nazi Germany: individual fates and global impact, Princeton University Press 2009 In particular, he has written extensively about Richard von Mises. preview of Statisticians of the Centuries
Since 2000 he has been a member of the Académie Internationale d'Histoire des Sciences headquartered in Paris. In 2011 he gave the historical lecture Landau und Schur: eine Freundschaft in unmenschlicher Zeit (Landau and Schur: a friendship in inhumane times), which was part of the events accompanying the Euler Lecture. In 2014 at the ICM in Seoul, he was an invited speaker with talk One hundred years after the Great War (1914–2014): A century of breakdowns, resumptions and fundamental changes in international mathematical communication. Since 2016 he has been co-editor of Historia Mathematica. In 2024 he was awarded the Otto Neugebauer Prize of the European Mathematical Society.Otto Neugebauer Prize 2024
Selected publications Articles
(Einstein's obituary for Emmy Noether in the New York Times) online text from McTutor
("Göttingen Field-grey": Einstein and the delayed perception of Emmy Noether's theorems on invariant variation problems (1918)) abstract (See Niels Henrik Abel & Sophus Lie.)
Books ; Mathematical reporting in Hitler's Germany: the demise of the Jahrbuch über die Fortschritte der Mathematik (Yearbook on the Progress of Mathematics)
abstract at American Mathematical Society Bookstore website
References