Mathwar/Personlist/Siegel Carl Ludwig
Carl Ludwig Siegel
(* December 31st 1896 in Berlin, † April 4th 1981 in Göttingen)
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Life
Siegel was born in Berlin, where he enrolled at the Humboldt University in Berlin in 1915 as a student in mathematics, astronomy, and physics. Amongst his teachers were Max Planck and Ferdinand Georg Frobenius, whose influence made the young Siegel abandon astronomy and turn towards number theory instead.
In 1917 he was drafted into the German Army and had to interrupt his studies. After the end of World War I, he enrolled at the Georg-August University of Göttingen, studying under Edmund Landau, who was his doctoral thesis supervisor (Ph.D. in 1920). He stayed in Göttingen as a teaching and research assistant; many of his groundbreaking results were published during this period. In 1922, he was appointed professor at the Johann Wolfgang Goethe-Universität.
In 1938, he returned to Göttingen before emigrating in 1940 via Norway to the United States, where he joined the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton University, where he had already spent a sabbatical in 1935. He returned to Göttingen only after World War II, when he accepted a post as professor in 1951, which he kept until his retirement in 1959.
Siegel's work on number theory and diophantine equations and celestial mechanics in particular won him numerous honours. In 1978, he was awarded the Wolf Prize in Mathematics, one of the most prestigious in the field.