Martin Eichler

Martin Eichler, born at Pinnow in Germany on 29 March 1912 and died in Basel on 7 October 1992, was a German mathematician who worked in number theory. He studied at Königsberg, Zürich and Halle-Wittenberg and took his doctorate in 1936 under Heinrich Brandt with a thesis on the number theory of rational quaternion algebras. Dismissed from his Halle assistantship for political reasons under the Nazi government, he found work through Helmut Hasse and qualified as a lecturer at Göttingen in 1939, then worked at the Peenemünde rocket research site during the war. After a spell at the Royal Aircraft Establishment at Farnborough he held chairs at Münster, Marburg and finally Basel. His books include Quadratische Formen und orthogonale Gruppen of 1952 on quadratic forms, an introduction to algebraic numbers and functions, Projective varieties and modular forms of 1971, and with Don Zagier The Theory of Jacobi Forms of 1985.