Kurt Hensel

Kurt Wilhelm Sebastian Hensel was a German mathematician born in Königsberg, best known for introducing the p-adic numbers, first described by him in 1897, which became increasingly important in number theory and other fields during the twentieth century. Born on 29 December 1861, he was the brother of the philosopher Paul Hensel, and his paternal grandparents were the painter Wilhelm Hensel and the composer Fanny Hensel. He studied mathematics in Berlin and Bonn under Leopold Kronecker and Karl Weierstrass, was later a professor at the University of Marburg until 1930, and was an editor of Crelle's Journal. He edited the five-volume collected works of Leopold Kronecker and died on 1 June 1941.