Konrad Knopp

Konrad Hermann Theodor Knopp (22 July 1882, Berlin, Germany – 20 April 1957, Annecy, France) was a German mathematician who worked on generalised limits and complex functions.

Family and education

Knopp was born in 1882 in Berlin to Paul Knopp (1845-1904), a businessman in manufacturing, and Helene (1857-1923), neé Ostertun, whose own father was a forester. Paul's hometown of Neustettin, then part of Germany, became Polish territory after the Second World War and is now called Szczecinek. Konrad himself married in 1910, to the painter Gertrud Kressner (1879-1974), and had a son and a daughter.

Konrad was primarily educated in Berlin, with a brief sojourn at the University of Lausanne in 1901 for a single semester, before settling at the University of Berlin, where he remained for his doctoral studies. His doctoral thesis, entitled Grenzwerte von Reihen bei der Annäherung an die Konvergenzgrenze, was supervised by Schottky and Frobenius; he received his PhD in 1907.

Travels, teaching, and military career

Knopp traveled widely in Asia, taking teaching jobs in Nagasaki, Japan (1908-9), at the Handelshochschule, and in Qingdao, China (1910-11), at the German-Chinese academy there, and spending some time in India and China following his stay in Japan. His wedding to Kressner, the daughter of Colonel Karl Kressner and Hedwig Rebling, took place in Germany between these periods. After Qingdao he returned to Germany for good and taught at military academies while writing his habilitation thesis for Berlin University.

During the first World War he was an officer and was wounded at the beginning of the war, which resulted in his discharge from the army; by the autumn of 1914 he was teaching at Berlin University. In the following year he was appointed as an extraordinary professor at the University of Königsberg, becoming an ordinary professor there in 1919. In 1926 he accepted a professorship at Tübingen University as the chair of mathematics, and remained there until his retirement in 1950.

Publications and editions

Selected articles of Knopp include:

• Knopp, Konrad (1916). "Bemerkungen zur Struktur einer linearen perfekten nirgends dichten Punktmenge". Math. Ann. 77 (3): 438–451. (in German)
• Knopp, Konrad (1918). "Ein einfaches Verfahren zur Bildüng stetiger nirgends differenzierbarer Funktionen". Math. Z. 2 (1–2): 1–26. (in German)
• Knopp, Konrad (1920). "Mittelwertbildung und Reihentransformation". Math. Z. 6 (1–2): 118–123. (in German)
• Knopp, Konrad (1923). "Über das Eulersche Summierungsverfahren". Math. Z. 18 (1): 125=156. (in German)
• Knopp, Konrad (1930). "Zur Theorie der Limitlerungsverfahren". Math. Z. 31 (1): 97–172, 276–305. (in German)
• Knopp, Konrad (1935). "Über die maximalen Abstände und Verhältnisse verschiedener Mittelwerte". Math. Z. 39 (1): 768–776. (in German)

After retirement Knopp continued to do mathematics, publishing for example

• Knopp, Konrad (1952). "Zwei Abelsche Sätze". Acad. Serbe Sci. Publ. Inst. Math. 4: 89–94.

and delivering the lecture Folgenräume und Limitierungsverfahren at the first meeting of the International Mathematics Union in 1952.

Knopp's mathematical research was on "generalized limits" and he wrote two books on sequences and series:

• Knopp, Konrad (1956). Infinite Sequences and Series (in English translation). Dover Publications. ISBN 978-0486601533.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: unrecognized language (link)
• Knopp, Konrad (1990). Theory and Application of Infinite Series (in English translation). Dover Publications. ISBN 978-0486661650.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: unrecognized language (link)

He also authored two texts on functions of a complex variable as well as a problem book:

• Knopp, Konrad (1996). Theory of Functions (in English translation). Dover Publications. ISBN 978-0486692197.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: unrecognized language (link)
• Knopp, Konrad (1952). Elements of the Theory of Functions (in English translation). Dover Publications. ISBN 978-0486601540.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: unrecognized language (link)
• Knopp, Konrad (2000). Problem Book in the Theory of Functions (in English translation). Dover Publications. ISBN 978-0486414515.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: unrecognized language (link)

He also produced the sixth edition of the three-volume work (a fourth volume was later added by Friedrich Lösch in 1980):

• von Mangoldt, Hans (1990). Konrad Knopp (ed.). Höhere Mathematik: eine Einführung für Studierende und zum Selbststudium (17th edition ed.). Stuttgart: S. Hirzel Verlag. ISBN 978-3-7776-0463-3. {{cite book}}: |edition= has extra text (help)

He was the co-founder of Mathematische Zeitschrift (in which the majority of his above-cited articles are published) in 1918, being the editor from 1934 to 1952.

References

The following works were used as sources for the MacTutor biography on which this article was originally based:

• Freudenthal, Hans (1970–1990). "Biography of Konrad Knopp". Dictionary of Scientifict Biography. New York.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: date format (link) CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link)
• Anonymous (1957). "Obituary: Konrad Knopp". Math. Z. 67 (1): v.
• Kamke, E. (1958). "Konrad Knopp". Jahresberichte der Deutschen Mathematiker vereinigung. 60: 44–49. {{cite journal}}: Unknown parameter |coauthors= ignored (|author= suggested) (help)
• Kamke, E. (1957). "Obituary: Konrad Knopp". Jahresberichte der Deutschen Mathematiker vereinigung. 60: 43–49. {{cite journal}}: Unknown parameter |coauthors= ignored (|author= suggested) (help)
• Knopp, Konrad (1985). "Mathematics as a cultural activity". Math. Intelligencer. 7 (1): 7–14, 26.
• Löbell, F. (1958). "Obituary: Konrad Knopp". Jbuch. Bayer. Akad. Wiss. München: 187–189.

External links

• O'Connor, John J.; Robertson, Edmund F., "Konrad Knopp", MacTutor History of Mathematics Archive, University of St Andrews
• Konrad Knopp at the Mathematics Genealogy Project