Wolfgang Döblin
| Wolfgang Doeblin | |
|---|---|
| Born | 17 March 1915 Berlin |
| Died | 21 June 1940 (aged 25) Housseras |
| Nationality |  France |
| Fields | Mathematics |
| Doctoral advisor | Paul Lévy Maurice René Fréchet |
| Known for | Itō–Doeblin theorem |
Wolfgang Döblin, known in France as Vincent Doblin, (17 March 1915 – 21 June 1940) was a French-German mathematician.
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Life [edit]
A native of Berlin, Wolfgang was the son of the Jewish-German novelist and physician, Alfred Döblin. His family escaped from Nazi Germany to France where he became a citizen. Studying probability theory at the Institute Henri Poincaré under Fréchet, he quickly made a name for himself as a gifted theorist. He became a doctor at age 23. Drafted in November 1938, after refusing to be exempted from military service, he had to stay in the active Army when World War II broke out in 1939, and was quartered at Givet, in the Ardennes, as a telephone operator. There, he wrote down his latest work on the Chapman–Kolmogorov equation, and sent this as a "pli cacheté" (sealed envelope) to the French Academy of Sciences. His company, sent to the sector of the Saare on the ligne Maginot in April 1940, was caught in the German attack in the Ardennes in May, withdrew to the Vosges, and capitulated on June 22, 1940. On June 21, Döblin shot himself in Housseras (a small village near Epinal), when German troops came in sight of the place. In his last moments, he burned his mathematical notes.
The sealed envelope was opened in 2000,[1] revealing that Döblin was ahead of his time in the development of the theory of Markov processes. In recognition of his results, Itō's lemma is now occasionally referred to as the Itō–Doeblin Theorem.[2]
His life was recently the subject of a movie by Agnes Handwerk and Harrie Willems, A Mathematician Rediscovered.[3]
Notes [edit]
- ^ Wolfgang Doeblin: "Sur l'équation de Kolmogoroff, Pli cacheté à l'Académie des Sciences, édité par B. Bru et M. Yor", CRAS, Paris, 331 (2000).
- ^ "Stochastic Calculus :: Itô–Döblin formula", Michael Stastny
- ^ Wolfgang Doeblin — Histoire des mathématiques Journals, Books & Online Media | Springer
References [edit]
- O'Connor, John J.; Robertson, Edmund F., "Wolfgang Döblin", MacTutor History of Mathematics archive, University of St Andrews.
- Wolfgang Döblin at the Mathematics Genealogy Project
- Bru, Bernard; Yor, Marc (January 2002), "Comments on the life and mathematical legacy of Wolfgang Doeblin", Finance and Stochastics (Berlin / Heidelberg: Springer-Verlag) 6 (1): 3–47, doi:10.1007/s780-002-8399-0, MR 1885582
- Lettre de l'Académie des sciences, no. 2, 2001
- Marc Petit: Die verlorene Gleichung. Auf der Suche nach Wolfgang und Alfred Döblin ("L'équation de Kolmogoroff"). Eichborn, Frankfurt/M. 2005, ISBN 3-8218-5749-8
- Ellinghaus, Jürgen / Ferry, Hubert: La lettre scellée du soldat Doblin / Der versiegelte Brief des Soldaten Döblin, TV documentary, 2006, ARTE/RBB [1]
- Ellinghaus, Jürgen / Gardini, Aldo: Die Irrfahrt des Soldaten Döblin, audiobook, ed. Stiftung Radio Basel, Christoph Merian Verlag, Basel, 2007.[http://www.merianverlag.ch/hoerbuecher/detail.cfm?ObjectID=3E5E7456-1422-0CEF-B4BA55D4CB63C777
- Mazliak, Laurent: "On the exchanges between Wolfgang Doeblin and Bohuslav Hostinský", Université Paris 6, Oct. 30, 2007.
External links [edit]
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- 1915 births
- 1940 deaths
- 20th-century mathematicians
- Alfred Döblin
- French mathematicians
- French military personnel who committed suicide
- German emigrants to France
- German mathematicians
- German refugees
- Jewish emigration from Nazi Germany
- Members of the French Academy of Sciences
- Mathematicians who committed suicide
- Writers from Berlin
- People of the German Empire
- People of the Weimar Republic
- People who emigrated to escape Nazism
- Probability theorists
