Edmund Georg Hermann Landau

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Born: 14 Feb 1877 in Berlin, Germany
Died: 19 Feb 1938 in Berlin, Germany

© Oberwolfach photo collection

Edmund Landau attended the French Lycée in Berlin, graduating at the age of 16 which is two years earlier than was normal. He then studied mathematics at the University of Berlin. His doctoral work there was supervised by Frobenius and Landau received his doctorate in 1899 for a work on number theory. Landau was always interested in mathematical puzzles and even before he received his doctorate he had published two books on mathematical problems in chess.

He submitted this Habilitation thesis in 1901, only two years after his doctorate, again on analytic number theory. Frobenius was somewhat critical of the area Landau worked in, and remarked at times that Landau's work would cease to become important if the Riemann hypothesis were proved.

Landau taught at the University of Berlin from 1899 until 1909. During this period his publication list rapidly grew so that by 1904 his publications exceeded his age of 27. While at Berlin his ability to teach became clearly evident. He taught beginners courses, which he did not have to take, and also lectured on his own speciality of number theory and, in addition, other lecture courses on foundations of mathematics, irrational numbers and set theory. Schappacher notes in [7] however:-

... it should also be said that he tended not to have cordial relationships with his students, being rather an aloof person.

In 1909 he was appointed to Göttingen as successor to Minkowski and Klein retired in 1913. The successor to Klein came and went in less than three years while he was followed by Hecke fill the chair but, against Landau's wishes, Courant was appointed.

Landau was to remain at Göttingen until the National Socialist regime forced him out of office in 1933. Teichmüller, as leader of the students, organised a boycott of Landau's lectures. After this Landau moved to Berlin and only lectured outside Germany, spending some time in Cambridge and in Holland.

Landau's main work was in analytic number theory and the distribution of primes. He gave a proof of the prime number theorem in 1903 which was considerably simpler that the ones given in 1896 by Vallée Poussin.

His work of 1909 gave the first systematic presentation of analytic number theory. He also wrote important works on the theory of analytic functions of a single variable.

Landau wrote over 250 papers on number theory which had a major influence on the development of the subject.

1. Biography in Dictionary of Scientific Biography (New York 1970-1990).

Articles:


2. M Chowdhury, Landau and Teichmüller, The Mathematical Intelligencer 17 (2) (1995), 12-14.
3. G H Hardy and H A Heilbronn, Edmund Landau, J. London Math. Soc. 13 (1938), 302-310.
4. D R Heath-Brown, Edmund Landau : Collected Works, Bull. London Math. Soc. 21 (1989), 342-350.
5. K Knopp, Edmund Landau, Jahresberichte der Deutschen Mathematiker vereinigung 54 (1) (1951), 55-62.
6. L Mirsky, In memory of Edmund Landau - Glimpses from the panorama of number theory and analysis, Math. Scientist 2 (1977), 1-26.
7. N Schappacher, Edmund Landau's Gottingen: From the life and death of a great mathematical centre, The Mathematical Intelligencer 13 (4) (1991), 12-18.