FRIEDRICH HIRZEBRUCH

'Friedrich E.P. Hirzebruch' (born 17 October 1927) is a German mathematician, working in the fields of topology, complex manifolds and algebraic geometry, and a leading figure in his generation.
He was born in Hamm, Westphalia. He studied at the University of Münster from 1945-1950, with one year at ETH Zürich. He then had a position at Erlangen, followed by the years 1952-54 at IAS in Princeton, New Jersey. After one year at Princeton University 1955-56, he was made a professor at the University of Bonn, where he remained, becoming director of the ''Max-Planck-Institut für Mathematik'' in 1981.
The Hirzebruch-Riemann-Roch theorem (1954) for complex manifolds was a major advance and quickly became part of the mainstream developments around the classical Riemann-Roch theorem; it was also a precursor of the Atiyah-Singer index theorem. Hirzebruch's book ''Neue topologische Methoden in der algebraischen Geometrie'' (1956) was a basic text for the 'new methods' of sheaf theory, in complex algebraic geometry. He went on to write the foundational papers on topological K-theory with Michael Atiyah, and collaborate with Armand Borel on the theory of characteristic classes. In his later work he provided a detailed theory of Hilbert modular surfaces, working with Don Zagier.
He was awarded a Wolf Prize in Mathematics in 1988, a Lobachevsky Medal in 1989, and the Cantor medal in 2004 amongst many other honours. He is also a foreign member of numerous academies and societies, including the United States National Academy of Sciences, the Russian Academy of Sciences,
and the French Academy of Sciences.

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See also

★ Atiyah-Hirzebruch spectral sequence

★ Hirzebruch signature theorem

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