Wilhelm Maak

Wilhelm Maak (13 August 1912 in Hamburg, 6 June 1992 in Göttingen) was a German mathematician whose research centred on almost periodic functions. He studied at the University of Hamburg, with a stay in Copenhagen in 1933 under Harald Bohr, and attended lectures by Erich Hecke, Emil Artin, Wilhelm Blaschke and Otto Schreier. He took his doctorate at Hamburg in 1936 under Erich Hecke with a thesis on abstract almost periodic functions, in which he proved the mean value theorem for such functions on groups by means of the combinatorial marriage theorem, discovered independently of Philip Hall. He became an assistant in Heidelberg in 1938, habilitated at Hamburg in 1939, and in 1951 or 1952 succeeded Oskar Perron as professor at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, moving to Göttingen in 1958 and retiring in 1977. From the 1950s he extended the theory of almost periodic functions to semigroups, and in 1951 he extended the equidistribution theorem of Weyl and Kronecker to non-abelian groups. Under the influence of Blaschke he also worked on integral geometry. He was president of the German Mathematical Society in 1960, a member of the Göttingen Academy of Sciences and a corresponding member of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences. His doctoral students include Konrad Jacobs.