Friedrich Schottky
Friedrich Hermann Schottky was a German mathematician who worked on elliptic, abelian, and theta functions and introduced Schottky groups and Schottky's theorem.
Biography
Friedrich Hermann Schottky was born in Breslau, Germany. His father, Dr. Hermann Friedrich Schottky, was an English teacher and his mother, Louise Winkler, was a florist. He attended from 1860 to 1870, where his classmates included,, and Eberhard Gothein.From 1870 to 1874 he attended the University of Breslau.In 1875 Schottky received his doctorate, studying under
Karl Weierstrass and Hermann von Helmholtz at Friedrich Wilhelm University of Berlin.
Schottky was a lecturer at the University of Breslau from 1878 to 1882, a professor at the University of Zurich from 1882 to 1892, and a professor at Philipps University of Marburg from 1892 to 1902. In 1902, through his friendship with Ferdinand Georg Frobenius, Schottky was able to obtain a professorship at Friedrich Wilhelm University of Berlin where he would remain until his retirement in 1922.
Schottky was elected to the Berlin Academy of Sciences in 1903.
Schottky died in Berlin in 1935.
Schottky married Henriette Schottky and had 5 children, including the physicist Walter H. Schottky and the botanist Ernst Max Schottky.
Mathematics
Schottky's thesis on conformal mapping was well regarded by Weierstrass. Published in journal form in 1877, it introduced automorphic functions and Schottky groups, to be developed several years later by Henri Poincaré and Felix Klein.Schottky's 1887 paper contributed to the theory of Poincaré series.
In algebraic geometry, the problem of characterizing when the abelian varieties of an algebraic curve are Jacobian varieties is called the Schottky problem. Initially posed by Bernhard Riemann, Schottky obtained the first results, for the case of genus 4, and made subsequent progress with his student Heinrich Jung. The problem was formally solved in 1986 by Takahiro Shiota but remains an area of active research.
In complex analysis, Schottky's theorem shows the existence of a bound on the value a holomorphic function can take on the unit disk.