Kurt Werner Friedrich Reidemeister (13 October 1893 – 8 July 1971) was a mathematician born in Braunschweig (Brunswick), Germany.
Life
left|thumb|Reidemeister in the late 1950s
He was a brother of Marie Neurath.
Beginning in 1912, he studied in Freiburg, Munich, Marburg, and Göttingen. In 1920, he got the (master's degree) in mathematics, philosophy, physics, chemistry, and geology.
He received his doctorate in 1921 with a thesis in algebraic number theory at the University of Hamburg under the supervision of Erich Hecke.
He became interested in differential geometry; he edited Wilhelm Blaschke's second volume on the topic, and both made an acclaimed contribution to the Jena DMV conference in September 1921.
In October 1922 in a bibliography of closely related authors.
In 1925 he became a full professor at the University of Königsberg; he stayed until 1933, when he was regarded politically unsound by the Nazis and dismissed from his position. Whilst there he organised the Second Conference on the Epistemology of the Exact Sciences in conjunction with journal Erkenntnis.
Blaschke managed to get a promise about Reidemeister's reappointment, and in autumn 1934 he got the chair of Kurt Hensel at the University of Marburg. He stayed there, except for a visit to the Princeton Institute for Advanced Study in 1948–1950, until he got appointed to Göttingen University in 1955, where he stayed until his emeritation.
He was also a philosopher. His book "Das exakte Denken der Griechen" (1949) is not as well known as his mathematical work. In it he remarks that mathematical thought is "just the beginning of thought".
See also
- Reidemeister moves
- Reidemeister–Singer theorem
- Reidemeister torsion
<!--*Reidemeister trace
- Reidemeister number-->