Wolfgang Heinrich Johannes Fuchs 1915--1997

1472 NOTICES OF THE AMS VOLUME 45, NUMBER 11 Biographical Sketch Wolfgang Heinrich Johannes Fuchs was born in Munich on May 19, 1915. He joined the faculty of Cornell University in 1950, where he remained through his retirement in 1985 until his death on February 24, 1997. His life and career were characterized by an unrelentingly positive and supportive attitude. He read avidly (in many languages), travelled widely, and was devoted to intellectual dignity and the international mathematical community. He wrote two important monographs and more than sixty-five papers in complex function theory and related areas. These achievements were recognized by the award of three fellowships: Guggenheim (1955), Fulbright-Hays (1973), and Humboldt (1978). Wolfgang graduated in 1933 from Johannes Gymnasium in Breslau (WroclÃaw), where his teacher, Hermann Kober (remembered for his Dictionary of Conformal Representations), convinced him to become a mathematician. Wolfgang’s obituary of Kober, published in 1975, contains warm memories of those times. Outside school hours he studied Russian and Chinese. Graduation occurred shortly after Hitler assumed power in Germany. Wolfgang’s parents were classified as Jews, and they recognized at once that a normal life would be impossible in Germany. They arranged for Wolfgang to enter St. John’s College, Cambridge, in the fall term of 1933 and were able to join him before war erupted in 1939. At this time the predominant figures in analysis at Cambridge were G. H. Hardy and J. E. Littlewood, and Wolfgang soon came under their spell. He received a Ph.D. in 1941 under the direction of A. E. Ingham [10]; we discuss this work below. In 1938 Wolfgang received a fellowship to Aberdeen, where he was fortunate to have W. W. Rogosinski, another refugee, as a colleague. They had known each other from Cambridge days and shared an interest in summability. Their collaboration intensified in the summer of 1940, when both were interred on the Isle of Man as “enemy aliens”. He would later describe this period as a “beautiful summer vacation”: there was a rich mathematical environment, and, since a chef of Buckingham Palace was another detainee, the food was rather good. In 1943, while still at Aberdeen, he met and married Dorothee Rausch von Traubenberg, another refugee from Germany, who was a student at the university. “His relationship with her was the center of his being” [W. K. Hayman]. Dorothee came from a distinguished academic family. Her father was dismissed from a professorship at Kiel in 1937 for his pacifist beliefs, but, above all, for J. Milne Anderson is professor of mathematics at University College, London. His e-mail address is [email protected].