Erich Kähler

Erich Kähler (1906 to 2000) was a German mathematician who worked in geometry and mathematical physics. Born in Leipzig, he studied there from 1924 and took his doctorate in 1928 under Leon Lichtenstein, then moved to Hamburg, where he became a Privatdozent in 1930 after submitting a habilitation thesis on the integrals of algebraic differential equations. His 1932 paper on a remarkable Hermitian metric introduced what are now called Kähler metrics, the starting point of Kähler geometry and its Kähler manifolds, ideas that have since become fundamental in string theory and the study of space-time. Chern, who attended his seminar on exterior differential systems in Hamburg, learned from him the calculus of exterior differential forms now known as Cartan-Kähler theory. Kähler held chairs at Königsberg, Leipzig, the Technical University of Berlin and Hamburg, retiring in 1974, and in later life turned increasingly to attempts to join mathematics with philosophy.