Friedrich Hirzebruch

Friedrich Ernst Peter Hirzebruch was a German mathematician, born in Hamm, Westphalia, on 17 October 1927, who worked in topology, complex manifolds and algebraic geometry and was a leading figure of his generation. He studied at the University of Munster from 1945 to 1950, held positions at Erlangen and the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, and from 1956 was a professor at the University of Bonn, where he became director of the Max Planck Institute for Mathematics in 1981. His Hirzebruch-Riemann-Roch theorem of 1954 for complex manifolds was a major advance, he wrote foundational papers on topological K-theory with Michael Atiyah, and with Don Zagier he developed the theory of Hilbert modular surfaces. From 1957 he organized the Mathematische Arbeitstagung at Bonn, which became a major source of developments in topology, geometry and number theory.