Max Deuring

Max Deuring was a German mathematician who worked in arithmetic geometry and analytic number theory. Born and raised in Göttingen, he studied there from 1926 and was drawn into the circle around Emmy Noether, who advised his doctoral research; he submitted his dissertation on the arithmetic theory of algebraic functions in 1930. He served as an assistant to Bartel van der Waerden at Leipzig, was blocked from habilitating at Göttingen for political reasons under the Nazi regime, and later held posts at Jena, Posen, Marburg and Hamburg before taking the Göttingen chair in 1950, which he held until he retired in 1976. His best known idea, from 1936, was an algebraic theory of correspondences on function fields, building on Helmut Hasse's work on elliptic curves; André Weil used it in 1948 for the Riemann hypothesis for curves of higher genus over finite fields. Deuring also classified the endomorphism rings of elliptic function fields and developed a general theory of good reduction, and he advised some twenty-five doctoral students.