Paul Koebe

Paul Koebe
Paul Koebe (1930)
Born(1882-02-15)15 February 1882
Luckenwalde, German Empire
Died6 August 1945(1945-08-06) (aged 63)
Leipzig, Germany
NationalityGerman
Alma materUniversity of Berlin
Known forKoebe function
Koebe 1/4 theorem
Koebe–Andreev–Thurston theorem
Planar Riemann surface
Uniformization theorem
AwardsAckermann–Teubner Memorial Award (1922)
Scientific career
FieldsMathematics
InstitutionsUniversity of Leipzig
University of Jena
Academic advisors
Notable students

Paul Koebe (15 February 1882 – 6 August 1945) was a 20th-century German mathematician. His work dealt exclusively with the complex numbers, his most important results being on the uniformization of Riemann surfaces in a series of four papers in 1907–1909. He did his thesis at Berlin, where he worked under Hermann Schwarz. He was an extraordinary professor at Leipzig from 1910 to 1914, then an ordinary professor at the University of Jena before returning to Leipzig in 1926 as an ordinary professor. He died in Leipzig.[1]

He conjectured the Koebe quarter theorem on the radii of disks in the images of injective functions, in 1907. His conjecture became a theorem when it was proven by Ludwig Bieberbach in 1916, and the function providing a tight example for this theorem became known as the Koebe function.[2]

  1. ^ O'Connor, John J.; Robertson, Edmund F., "Paul Koebe", MacTutor History of Mathematics Archive, University of St Andrews
  2. ^ Duren, Peter L. (1983), Univalent functions, Grundlehren der Mathematischen Wissenschaften [Fundamental Principles of Mathematical Sciences], vol. 259, Springer-Verlag, New York, pp. 30–31, ISBN 0-387-90795-5, MR 0708494