Hans Zassenhaus


Hans Julius Zassenhaus was a German mathematician, known for work in many parts of abstract algebra, and as a pioneer of computer algebra.

Biography

He was born in Koblenz in 1912.
His father was a historian and advocate for Reverence for Life as expressed by Albert Schweitzer. Hans had two brothers, Guenther and Wilfred, and sister Hiltgunt, who wrote an autobiography in 1974. According to her, their father lost his position as school principal due to his philosophy. She wrote:
At the University of Hamburg Zassenhaus came under the influence of Emil Artin. As he wrote later:
When just 21, Zassenhaus was studying composition series in group theory. He proved his butterfly lemma that provides a refinement of two normal chains to isomorphic central chains. Inspired by Artin, Zassenhaus wrote a textbook Lehrbuch der Gruppentheorie that was later translated as Theory of Groups.
His thesis was on doubly transitive permutation groups with Frobenius groups as stabilizers. These groups are now called Zassenhaus groups. They have had a deep impact on the classification of finite simple groups.
He obtained his doctorate in June 1934, and took the teachers’ exam the next May. He became a scientific assistant at University of Rostock. In 1936 he became assistant to Artin back in Hamburg, but Artin departed for the USA the following year. Zassenhaus gave his Habilitation in 1938.
According to his sister Hiltgunt, Hans was "called up as a research scientist at a weather station" for his part in the German war effort.
Zassenhaus married Lieselotte Lohmann in 1942. The couple raised three children: Michael, Angela, and Peter. In 1943 Zassenhaus became extraordinary professor. He became Managing Director of the Hamburg Mathematical Seminar.
After the war, and as a fellow of the British Council, Zassenhaus visited the University of Glasgow in 1948. There he was given an honorary Master of Arts degree. The following year he joined the faculty of McGill University where the endowments of Peter Redpath financed a professorship. He was at McGill for a decade with leaves of absence to the Institute for Advanced Study and California Institute of Technology. There he was using computers to advance number theory. In 1959 Zassenhaus began teaching at University of Notre Dame and became director of its computing center in 1964.
Zassenhaus was a Mershon visiting professor at Ohio State University in the fall of 1963. In 1965 he came to Ohio State permanently. The mathematics department was led by Arnold Ross; Zassenhaus found a home there until his retirement in 1982. Nonetheless, he continued to take leaves of absence for visits to Göttingen, Heidelberg, UCLA, Warwick, CIT, U Montreal, Saarbrücken.
He served as editor in chief of the Journal of Number Theory from its first issue in 1967. He won a Lester R. Ford Award in 1968.
Hans Zassenhaus died in Columbus, Ohio on November 21, 1991. His doctoral students include Joachim Lambek.

Important publications

A famous group theory book based on a course by Emil Artin given at the University of Hamburg during winter semester 1933 and summer semester 1934.