Arnold Scholz

Arnold Scholz was a German mathematician who worked in algebraic number theory and lived from 1904 to 1942. Born in Berlin, he studied mathematics, philosophy and musicology at the University of Berlin and wrote his 1928 dissertation under Issai Schur on the construction of algebraic number fields with solvable Galois group. He later held posts at Berlin, Freiburg and Kiel, and was conscripted in 1940 to teach at the Naval School at Flensburg-Mürwik, where he died of diabetes in 1942. His early work on the inverse Galois problem, done jointly with Hans Reichardt, settled it for p-groups with p odd, and in 1928 he showed that number fields with arbitrarily long class field towers exist. Scholz's reciprocity law and the Scholz conjecture on addition chains carry his name, and he kept up a long correspondence with Helmut Hasse.