Mathwar/Personlist/Magnus Wilhelm
Wilhelm Magnus
(* February 5th 1907 in Berlin, † October 15th 1990)
Life
Wilhelm Magnus attended the University of Frankfurt receiving his doctorate from that university in 1931. His doctorate was supervised by Dehn who asked Magnus various questions about one-relator groups in 1928. Magnus was able to answer these questions and published his results on one-relator groups in 1930. In 1932 he published a major result in combinatorial group theory when he proved that the word problem for one-relator groups is soluble.
In 1935 Magnus gave examples of finitely presented groups which were isomorphic to proper factor groups of themselves. Hopf had originally asked whether such groups exist and, although Jakob Nielsen had shown that free groups of finite rank have this property ten years before Hopf asked the question, nobody - including Jakob Nielsen himself - noticed the question had already been answered.
However Magnus's career was to hit problems when he refused to join the Nazi Party and, as a consequence of this, was not allowed to hold an academic post during World War II. Instead he had to work in industry. In 1947 he was offered a professorship at the University of Göttingen but he was not to remain there for long.
In 1946 Bateman died and Whittaker was asked to recommend someone who could undertake the project of organising and publishing Bateman's manuscripts. Whittaker's advice was that Erdélyi should lead the project and, in 1947, Erdélyi went to the California Institute of Technology. The project was a major one and other collaborators were needed. Magnus left Göttingen to join the Bateman project in 1948. He collaborated on the production of three volumes of Higher Transcendental Functions and two volumes of Tables of Integral Transforms.