Norbert Schappacher


Norbert Schappacher is a German mathematician and historian of mathematics. He was an Invited Speaker at the International Congress of Mathematicians in 2010 in Hyderabad.

Education and career

After secondary education at Essen's Burggymnasium, Schappacher studied from 1969 to 1971 at the University of Bonn, where he was taught by Günter Harder and Friedrich Hirzebruch. Schappacher obtained his Vordiplom in 1971 at the University of Göttingen, where he studied from 1971 to 1974 and was taught by Hans Grauert, Ulrich Stuhler, and Martin Kneser. For the academic year 1974–1975, Schappacher studied as an exchange student at the University of California, Berkeley, where his teachers included Tsit Yuen Lam and Robin Hartshorne. At the University of Göttingen, Schappacher received his Diplom in 1975 and from 1977 to 1986 held the position of assistant at the Göttingen Mathematical Institute. There in 1978 he received his doctorate with advisor Martin Kneser and thesis Eine diophantische Invariante von Singularitäten über nichtarchimedischen Körpern.
He was from 1979 to 1981 at Paris-Sud University in Orsay with John H. Coates and for the academic year 1983–1984 at the Max-Planck-Institut für Mathematik in Bonn with Günter Harder. Schappacher in 1985 was an assistant professor at Paris-Sud University and habilitated in 1986 at the University of Göttingen with thesis Periods of Hecke operators. He was in 1986 at the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute in Berkeley, then worked in 1987 as an assistant professor in Orsay and was from 1987 to 1991 a Heisenberg fellow at the MPI in Bonn. He was at the Institute for Advanced Study for five months in 1990.
Schappacher is since 1991 a professor at the University of Strasbourg. From 2002 to 2004 he was a visiting professor at TU Darmstadt and returned in 2004 to the University of Strasbourg. He has held visiting positions at several academic institutions, including the Isaac Newton Institute, Mumbai's Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, and the Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Göttingen. In 2011–2012 he was a Fellow of Lichtenberg-Kolleg, Göttingen.
Schappacher's research is primarily on number theory, arithmetic geometry, and the history of mathematics. He has done research on the history of mathematics in Germany during the era of National Socialism, as well as historical research on Kurt Heegner, Bartel Leendert [van der Waerden], Diophantus of Alexandria, and Leonhard Euler. Since 2008 Schappacher is a member of the Euler Committee of the Swiss Academy of Sciences. He was from 2009 to 2016 editor-in-chief of the Revue d'histoire des mathématiques and is the managing editor of the Elemente der Mathematik.
In 2011 he was elected a corresponding member of the Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Göttingen.

Selected publications

Articles

  • with Günter Harder in:
  • with Martin Kneser: Fachverband – Institut – Staat. Streiflichter auf das Verhältnis von Mathematik zu Gesellschaft und Politik in Deutschland seit 1890 unter besonderer Berücksichtigung der Zeit des Nationalsozialismus. In: Gerd Fischer, Friedrich Hirzebruch, Winfried Scharlau, Willi Törnig : Ein Jahrhundert Mathematik 1890-1990. Festschrift zum Jubiläum der DMV. Vieweg, Braunschweig 1990, , pp. 1–82
  • On the history of Hilbert's twelfth problem, in: Michele Audin, Matériaux pour l'histoire des mathématiques au XXe siècle Actes du colloque à la mémoire de Jean Dieudonné, SMF 1998 in Heinrich Becker, Hans-Joachim Dahms, Cornelia Wegener : Die Universität Göttingen unter dem Nationalsozialismus, K. G. Saur, München 1998, pp. 523–551
  • "Seventy years ago: The Bourbaki Congress at El Escorial and other mathematical events of 1936." In , pp. 8–15. 2006.
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Books

Periods of Hecke characters, Springer-Verlag, Berlin 1988, ;