Adolf Hurwitz

Adolf Hurwitz (1859 to 1919) was a German mathematician who worked in algebra, analysis, geometry and number theory. Born in Hildesheim, he studied under Felix Klein, who supervised his doctorate on elliptic modular functions at Leipzig in 1881, and he also attended lectures by Weierstrass, Kronecker and Kummer in Berlin. After a spell as a Privatdozent at Göttingen and eight years at Königsberg, where he taught David Hilbert and Hermann Minkowski, he held the chair at the Zürich Polytechnic from 1892 until his death. His work includes studies of the genus of Riemann surfaces, a proof that the automorphism groups of algebraic Riemann surfaces of genus above one are finite, a factorisation theory for integer quaternions, and a determinant criterion for when a real polynomial has only roots with negative real parts.