Heinrich Guggenheimer

Heinrich Walter Guggenheimer (born 21 July 1924) is a German-born American mathematician who has contributed to knowledge in differential geometry, topology, algebraic geometry, and convexity. He has also contributed volumes on Jewish sacred literature.

Heinrich Guggenheimer was born in Nuremberg, Germany. He is the son of Marguerite Bloch and Siegfried Guggenheimer. He studied in Zurich, Switzerland at the Eidgenössiche Technische Hochschule, receiving his diploma in 1947 and a D.Sc. in 1951. His dissertation was titled "On complex analytic manifolds with Kahler metric". It was published in Commentarii Mathematici Helvetici:25:257–97 (in German).

Guggenheimer began his teaching career at Hebrew University as lecturer 1954–6. He was a professor at Bar Ilan University 1956–9. In 1959 he immigrated to the United States, becoming a naturalized citizen in 1965. Washington State University was his first American post, where he was an associate professor. After one year he moved to University of Minnesota where he was raised to a full professor in 1962. While in Minnesota he wrote Differential Geometry (1963), a textbook treating "classical problems with modern methods". According to Robert Hermann^[1] in 1979, "Among today's treatises, the best one from the point of view of the Erlangen Program is Differential Geometry by H. Guggenheimer, Dover Publications, 1977."

In 1967 Guggenheimer published Plane Geometry and its Groups (Holden Day), and moved to New York City to teach at Polytechnic University, now called Polytechnic Institute of New York University. In 1977 he published Applicable Geometry: Global and Local Convexity.^[2]

Until 1995 Guggenheimer produced a steady stream of papers in mathematical journals. As a supervisor of graduate study in Minnesota and New York he had six students proceed to Ph.D.s with theses supervised by him, two in Minnesota and four in New York. See the link to the Mathematics Genealogy Project below.

Guggenheimer has also contributed to literature on Judaism. In 1966 he wrote "Logical problems in Jewish tradition".^[3] The next year he contributed "Magic and Dialect" to Diogenes (15:80–6) where he examines the supposition that "knowledge of the right name gives power over the bearer of that name". In 1995 Heinrich Guggenheimer presented his A Scholar’s Haggadah, which makes a bilingual comparison of variances in the traditions of Passover observance. It includes Ashkenazic, Sephardic, and Oriental sources. From 2000 to 2015 he published a 17 volume edition and commentary to the Jerusalem Talmud De Gruyter.

Family

On 6 June 1947 Heinrich married Eva Auguste Horowitz. Together they wrote Jewish Family Names and their Origins: an Etymological Dictionary (1992).^[4] They have two sons, Michael and Tobias I. S., and two daughters Esther Furman and Hanna Y. Guggenheimer.

Notes

1. Robert Herman (1979) "Conformal and Non-Euclidean Geometry in R³ from the Kleinian Viewpoint", Appendix A, page 367 of Development of Mathematics in the 19th Century by Felix Klein, Math Sci Press, Boston.
2. Robert E. Krieger Publishing Company, Huntington N.Y.
3. Ph. Longworth ed. (1966) Confrontations with Judaism
4. KTAV Publishing House, Inc. ISBN 978-0-88125-297-2, 882 pages. Google Books

References

• Allen G. Debus, "Heinrich Walter Guggenheimer", Who's Who in Science, 1968.
• Heinrich Guggenheimer at Mathematics Genealogy Project.
• "Guggenheimer, Heinrich Walter" in American Men and Women of Science, 25th edition, Gale, 2008.