Erich Schönhardt

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Erich Schönhardt (25 June 1891 – 29 November 1979)[1][2] was a German mathematician known for his 1928 discovery of the Schönhardt polyhedron, a non-convex polyhedron that cannot be partitioned into tetrahedra without introducing additional vertices.[3]

Schönhardt studied at the University of Stuttgart,[2] and went on to do his graduate studies at the University of Tübingen, receiving his Ph.D. in 1920 for a thesis on Schottky groups[4] under the supervision of Ludwig Maurer.[2] In the 1930s, he was the Dozentenführer (Nazi political leader of the faculty) at Tübingen,[2][5] and was responsible for denouncing fellow Tübingen mathematician Erich Kamke for having married a Jewish woman.[5] He moved back to the University of Stuttgart in 1936[2] and was rector there from 1939 to 1942.[1][2][6] He was a permanent editor of the journal Deutsche Mathematik.

References[edit]

  1. ^ a b Maier, Helmut (2007), Geschichte der Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gesellschaft im Nationalsozialismus, vol. 16, Wallstein Verlag, pp. 618–619, ISBN 978-3-8353-0109-2.
  2. ^ a b c d e f Short biographies of mathematicians SA–SCHO Archived 27 June 2009 at the Wayback Machine, German Mathematical Society, retrieved 5 December 2009.
  3. ^ Schönhardt, E. (1928), "Über die Zerlegung von Dreieckspolyedern in Tetraeder", Math. Annalen, 98: 309–312, doi:10.1007/BF01451597, S2CID 116091853[permanent dead link].
  4. ^ Erich Schönhardt at the Mathematics Genealogy Project.
  5. ^ a b Segal, Sanford L. (2003), Mathematicians under the Nazis, Princeton University Press, pp. 105, 176, ISBN 978-0-691-00451-8.
  6. ^ Rectorate of the University of Stuttgart, Historic Commission of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences and Humanities.