Mathwar/Personlist/Hilbert David
David Hilbert
(* January 23rd 1862 in Königsberg, † February 14th 1943 in Göttingen)
German mathematician, recognized as one of the most influential and universal mathematicians of the 19th and early 20th centuries. He discovered or developed a broad range of fundamental ideas in many areas, including invariant theory and the axiomatization of geometry. He also formulated the theory of Hilbert spaces, one of the foundations of functional analysis.
Life
Hilbert lived to see the Nazis purge many of the prominent faculty members at University of Göttingen, in 1933. Among those forced out were Hermann Weyl, who had taken Hilbert's chair when he retired in 1930, Emmy Noether and Edmund Landau. One of those who had to leave Germany was Paul Bernays, Hilbert's collaborator in mathematical logic, and co-author with him of the important book Die Grundlagen der Mathematik (which eventually appeared in two volumes, in 1934 and 1939). This was a sequel to the Hilbert – Ackermann book Principles of Mathematical Logic from 1928.
About a year later, he attended a banquet, and was seated next to the new Minister of Education, Bernhard Rust. Rust asked, "How is mathematics in Göttingen now that it has been freed of the Jewish influence?" Hilbert replied, "Mathematics in Göttingen? There is really none any more."
By the time Hilbert died in 1943, the Nazis had nearly completely restructured the university, many of the former faculty being either Jewish or married to Jews. Hilbert's funeral was attended by fewer than a dozen people, only two of whom were fellow academics, among them Arnold Sommerfeld, a theoretical physicist and also a son of the City of Königsberg. News of his death only became known to the wider world six months after he had died.