Oswald Teichmüller

Paul Julius Oswald Teichmüller was a German mathematician, born in Nordhausen in 1913 and lost on the Eastern Front in 1943. He studied at Göttingen, where Helmut Hasse supervised a doctoral thesis on operator theory, then turned to algebra and, after lectures by Rolf Nevanlinna, to complex analysis. In Berlin he worked beside Ludwig Bieberbach and brought quasiconformal mappings and differential geometric methods into the study of Riemann surfaces. Teichmüller space, the Teichmüller character and the Teichmüller cocycle are named after him. He was also a committed Nazi who organised the 1933 boycott of the lectures of Edmund Landau, a fact that any honest account of his mathematics must keep beside his achievements. He volunteered for combat after Stalingrad and disappeared in September 1943.