Wolfgang Gröbner

Wolfgang Gröbner (1899 to 1980) was an Austrian mathematician whose name is attached to the Gröbner basis, a tool for computations in algebraic geometry. The theory of Gröbner bases for polynomial rings was developed in 1965 by his student Bruno Buchberger, who named the bases after him. Gröbner was born in Gossensass in the County of Tyrol and first studied engineering at the University of Technology in Graz before switching to mathematics in 1929. He wrote his dissertation in 1932 at the University of Vienna under Philipp Furtwängler, then studied at Göttingen under Emmy Noether in what is now called commutative algebra. Later he and his students contributed to the numerical analysis of ordinary differential equations and to industrial applications of Lie series. He is also credited with the Alekseev-Gröbner formula and received the Wilhelm Exner Medal in 1969.