Otto Toeplitz

Otto Toeplitz was a German mathematician who worked on infinite linear and quadratic forms. He was born in Breslau on 1 August 1881 and died in Jerusalem on 15 February 1940. He came from a Jewish family that included several teachers of mathematics, and he studied algebraic geometry at the University of Breslau, where he was awarded his doctorate in 1905. In 1906 he went to Göttingen, where Hilbert was completing his theory of integral equations; Toeplitz reworked the classical theories of forms on finite-dimensional spaces for infinite-dimensional spaces and wrote five papers directly related to Hilbert's spectral theory. In the 1930s he developed a general theory of infinite dimensional spaces, and he criticised Banach's work as too abstract.