FRIEDRICHS

GERMANY (see also List of Individuals)

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1901 Kiel/D - 31.12.1982 New York/USA

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Kurt Friedrichs studied mathematics and physics at the Universities of Greifswald, Freiburg and Graz and graduated from Göttingen University in 1924. He submitted a PhD thesis in 1925 and in 1928 a habilitation thesis to the Universities of Aachen and Göttingen. During this period he collaborated with Theodor von Karman (1881-1963). He was then appointed professor of mathematics at University of Braunschweig, a position he held until 1937 when emigrating to the USA. From 1939 he was an associate professor and 4 years later full professor of applied mathematics at the New York University. The present Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences was founded in 1937 by Richard Courant, Friedrichs and J.J. Stoker. Friedrichs had taken US citizenship in 1944. He was awarded the 18th John von Neumann Lecture by the Society of Industrial and Applied Mechanics SIAM in 1978.

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Friedrichs' main topics of research were partial differential equations and functional analysis. His research was mostly motivated by practical questions, such as the propagation of waves or problems in hydrodynamics. He authored keystone books as those with Courant in 1948 or with Richard von Mises (1883-1953) in 1971. Friedrichs was awarded the National Medal of Science, the prime scientific distinction of the USA. He was a Member of the National Academy of Sciences, USA, and received honorary doctorates from the universities of New York, Aachen, Braunschweig and Uppsala.

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_{Anonymous (1978). Dr. Kurt O. Friedrichs. SIAM News 11(6): 1. P}

_{Anonymous (1985). Kurt Otto Friedrichs. Bayerische Akademie der Wissenschaften Jahrbuch: 210-211. P}

_{Courant, R., Friedrichs, K. (1948). Supersonic flow and shock waves. Interscience: New York. Friedrichs, K., Karman, T. von (1929). Zur Berechnung freitragender Flügel. ZAMM 9(4): 261- 269.}

_{Friedrichs, K.O. (1965). Lectures on advanced ordinary differential equations. Gordon and Breach: New York.}

_{Halmos, P.R. (1987). K.O. Friedrichs. I have a photographic memory: 231. American Mathematical Society: Providence RI. P}

_{Mises, R. von, Friedrichs, K. (1971). Fluid dynamics. Springer: New York.}

_{Poggendorff, J.C. (1936). Friedrichs, Kurt. Biographisch-Literarisches Handwörterbuch}

_{6: 820-821; 7a: 125-126; 8: 1293-1294. Verlag Chemie: Leipzig, Berlin, with bibliography.}