Konrad Jacobs

Konrad Jacobs (24 August 1928 in Rostock, 26 July 2015 in Bamberg) was a German mathematician who worked mainly on probability theory, combinatorics, information theory and dynamical systems. He studied mathematics and physics in Munich and Hamburg from 1947 to 1954 and took his doctorate at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich in 1954 under Wilhelm Maak with a thesis on an ergodic theorem for bounded groups in Hilbert space. He habilitated in Munich in 1957, was a lecturer at Göttingen in 1958 and became full professor of mathematical statistics there in 1959. In 1965 he moved to the newly created chair of mathematical statistics at Erlangen-Nuremberg, where he and Heinz Bauer represented measure and probability theory. He was best known for his work in ergodic theory, on which he wrote a volume of the Springer Ergebnisse series, and he also wrote books that popularised mathematics and presented a television series on basic mathematics. His doctoral students include Volker Strassen, Ulrich Krengel, Michael Keane, Rudolf Ahlswede, Hans Föllmer and Hans-Otto Georgii. He also assembled a large collection of portrait photographs of mathematicians, which he gave to the Oberwolfach research institute in 2005.