Heinz Prüfer

Heinz Prüfer (1896 to 1934) was a German algebraist born in Wilhelmshaven who is remembered chiefly for his work on abelian groups. He studied at the Humboldt University of Berlin, where Issai Schur supervised his doctorate, awarded in 1921 for a thesis on infinite abelian groups of elements of finite order. After assistantships in Hamburg and Jena, where he worked with Paul Koebe, he became a docent at Münster in 1927 and a professor there in 1930. His 1923 paper on countable primary abelian groups introduced the ideas of height and purity and gave the theorem now named after him, and the Prüfer group provides the standard example of a countable p-group that is not a direct sum of rank one groups. His later papers developed what became known as the Prüfer topology and linearly compact groups, treated algebraic numbers, wrote an introduction to knot theory, and gave a simple proof of an expansion theorem in Sturm-Liouville theory. He died of lung cancer at the age of 37, and his Münster lecture notes on projective geometry were published after his death.