Jürgen Neukirch

Jürgen Neukirch (1937 to 1997) was a German mathematician best known for his work in algebraic number theory. He took his diploma in mathematics at the University of Bonn in 1964 and wrote his doctoral thesis under Wolfgang Krull, for which he received the Felix Hausdorff Memorial Prize in 1965. After habilitating a year later he was a guest professor at Queen's University in Kingston and at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, then a professor at Bonn, and from 1971 at the University of Regensburg. His name is attached to the Báyer-Neukirch theorem on special values of L-functions and to the Neukirch-Uchida theorem in birational anabelian geometry, and he worked on the embedding problem and on arithmetic Riemann existence theorems. He also gave a simple description of the reciprocity maps in local and global class field theory, and wrote standard books on class field theory and algebraic number theory.