Heinrich Behnke


Heinrich Adolph Louis Behnke was a German mathematician and rector at the University of Münster.

Life and career

He was born into a Lutheran family in Horn, a suburb of Hamburg. He attended the University of Göttingen and submitted his doctoral thesis to the University of Hamburg. He was noted for work on complex analysis with Henri Cartan and Peter Thullen. His first wife, Aenne Albersheim, was Jewish, but she died soon after the birth of their son. He was concerned about his son's ethnicity during the Nazi period. In 1936 he was elected a member of the Deutsche Akademie der Naturforscher Leopoldina.

Publications