Biography of the Week:   Emil Artin

  Emil Artin was born March 3^rd 1898 in Vienna, Austria. Born into a family that appreciated the arts (his father was an art dealer and his mother an opera singer), he held an interest in music throughout his life, and was proficient in the flute, harpsichord, and clavichord. Apparantly Artin liked “techno” as well (though it must have been in a fledgeling form…), as P. Roquette once noted,  

   I remember in Hamburg when he once told me of a conference on electronic music which he had attended.  

  During his years in primary and secondary school, Artin’s performance in mathematics was not in any way indicative of his potential. It was only in the later years of his secondary education that Artin began to cultivate what would become a deep understanding of mathematics. Artin studied algebra and number theory at the University of Leipzig, and went on to make fundamental contributions in the areas of Ring theory, Field theory, and Algebraic Number theory. He is also credited with solving Hilbert’s 17^th problem, and gave a complete solution in his 1927 paper Über die Zerlegung definiter Funcktionen in Quadrate.

Click here to learn more about Emil Artin.