Ott-Heinrich Keller
Eduard Ott-Heinrich Keller (1906-1990) was a German mathematician who worked in the fields of geometry, topology and algebraic geometry. He formulated the celebrated problem which is now called the Jacobian conjecture in 1939.
He was born in Frankfurtam-Main, and studied at the universities of Frankfurt, Vienna, Berlin and Göttingen. As a student of Max Dehn he wrote a dissertation on the tiling of space with cubes. This led to another 'Keller conjecture': the Keller cube-tiling conjecture from 1930. This was shown to be true in dimensions at most 6 by Oskar Perron in 1940, and to be false in dimensions at least 10 by Jeffrey Lagarias and Peter Shor in 1992. The related Minkowski lattice cube-tiling conjecture was proved by Hajós in 1942.
Subsequently he worked with Georg Hamel in Berlin, habilitating in 1933 with a thesis on Cremona transformations. The Jacobian conjecture is quite naturally posed in that setting. The motivation for looking at rather general polynomial transformations, say of the projective plane, came from the singularity theory for algebraic curves.
During World War II he taught in a naval college in Flensburg. After the war he had several positions, and was appointed a professor at Wittenberg in 1951, as successor of H. W. E. Jung.
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Categories: Mathematicians | 1906 births | 1990 deaths