Carl ludwig siegel biography

From the University of St. Andrews:

[Carl] Siegel is especially famed for his work on the theory of numbers where he held an eminent role. Schneider, who was a student of Siegel's, gave three lectures on Siegel's contributions to number theory to the German Mathematical Union in 1982. These include his improvement of Thue's theorem, given in his 1920 dissertation, and its application to certain polynomial Diophantine equations in two unknowns, proving an affine curve of genus at least 1 over a number field has only a finite number of integral points in 1929. In his two-part 1929 paper, Siegel made a substantial contribution to transcendence theory, especially a new method for the algebraic independence of values of certain E-functions. He proved that if J⁰ is the Bessel function of index 0, then for any non-zero algebraic integer r he showed that J⁰(r) is transcendental.

“Carl Siegel” University of St. Andrews (2000)

For the German architecture professor, see Carl August Benjamin Siegel.

Carl Ludwig Siegel (31 December 1896 – 4 April 1981) was a German mathematician specialising in analytic number theory. He is known for, amongst other things, his contributions to the Thue–Siegel–Roth theorem in Diophantine approximation, Siegel's method, Siegel's lemma and the Siegel mass formula for quadratic forms. He has been named one of the most important mathematicians of the 20th century.

André Weil, without hesitation, named Siegel as the greatest mathematician of the first half of the 20th century. Atle Selberg said of Siegel and his work:

He was in some ways, perhaps, the most impressive mathematician I have met. I would say, in a way, devastatingly so. The things that Siegel tended to do were usually things that seemed impossible. Also after they were done, they still seemed almost impossible.

Biography

Siegel was born in Berlin, where he enrolled at the Humboldt University in Berlin in 1915 as a student in mathematics, astronomy, and physics. Amongst h

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