Gottfried Köthe

Gottfried Köthe was an Austrian mathematician who worked in abstract algebra, functional analysis and topological vector spaces. He was born in Graz on 25 December 1905 and died in Frankfurt on 30 April 1989. His father was a businessman and engineer, and he graduated from the Realgymnasium in Graz in the summer of 1923. He entered the University of Graz that autumn intending to study chemistry, which with philosophy had been his favourite subject at school. A chance meeting on holiday with the philosopher Alfred Kastil of Innsbruck brought philosophy back into the foreground, and in his own words he became a mathematician almost by chance. The MacTutor biography records his later career in algebra and in the theory of topological vector spaces.