Günther Nürnberger January 13, 1948-May 11, 2013

Günther Nürnberger was born on January 13, 1948, near Marktredwitz, a little town in North Bavaria, Germany. In 1969 he matriculated in the university of Erlangen-Nürnberg and did there his diploma thesis in Functional Analysis in 1974. One year later he finished his doctoral thesis, both theses under the supervision of Dietrich Kölzow. In his thesis [1] he studied the problem of characterization, existence and uniqueness of (measurable, linear or continuous) selections for the metric projection in normed linear spaces. In 1979, Günther received his Habilitation. From 1974 until 1983 he was an assistant resp. assistant professor at the Institute of Applied Mathematics in Erlangen. After this he hold professorships at the universities of Mannheim (1983–1985) and Erlangen (1985–1989) and, finally, in 1989 he got a chair for Mathematics at Mannheim. He remained there until his untimely death. From 1993 to 1994 he was Dean of the Faculty of Mathematics and Computer Science. He served as an Associate Editor of six international journals, including Journal of Approximation Theory (since 1989) and Communications in Applied Mathematics (since 1997). Günther was a very active and creative researcher. He wrote nearly 100 research papers (see the enclosed “List of Publications”). His book on “Approximation by Spline Functions” (Springer, 1989) has been often used as background for lectures and seminars on splines. Günther’s contributions to approximation theory cover a number of popular subjects, such as continuous selections for the metric projection, uniqueness and strong uniqueness of best uniform approximations from univariate splines, best uniform approximation and interpolation