Mathwar/Personlist/Faber Georg
Georg Faber
(* June 6th 1876 in Frankfurt, † November 12th 1944 KZ Theresienstadt)
Life
He worked at a number of universities, being appointed to the University of Tübingen as an extraordinary professor in 1909, then a year later as an ordinary professor at the Technische Hochschule in Stuttgart. He remained in Stuttgart until 1912 when he moved to the University of Königsberg for a year, again moving on, this time to the University of Strasbourg. He was appointed to the chair of Higher Mathematics at the Technische Hochschule in Munich in 1916. This was a post he held until he retired in 1946.
Faber's most important work was on the polynomial expansion of functions. This is the problem of expanding an analytical function in an area bounded by a smooth curve as a sum of polynomials, where the polynomials are determined by the area. These polynomials are now known as 'Faber polynomials' and first appear in Faber's 1903 paper Über polynomische Entwickelungen published in Mathematische Annalen. Another important paper which he also published in Mathematische Annalen, this time in 1909, was Über stetige Funktionen. In this paper he introduced the 'hierarchical basis' and explicitly used it for the representation of functions. In fact Faber was building on the idea of Archimedes who computed approximately using a hierarchy of polygonal approximations of a circle. Only in the 1980s was Faber's idea seen to be an important ingredient for the efficient solution of partial differential equations.