Lothar Collatz (1910 - 1990)

Biography

Lothar Collatz is Notable.

Lothar was born in Arnsberg in the Sauerland region in 1910, and moved with his parents via Minden to Stettin, where he completed his Abitur with excellent marks in 1928. For six decades he had a productive career in pure and applied mathematics, in particular approximation theory; he died while attending a conference in Varna, Bulgaria in 1990.

He is best known for the 3n+1 conjecture, usually referred to as the Collatz conjecture; work towards a proof is ongoing. It seems he was the first to use the term 'Rayleigh quotient' in a 1939 paper about ordinary differential equation eigenvalue problems.

In his personal life he was known to enjoy model rail sets and electronics kits. He was also an amateur painter and ceramicist.^[1]

Sources

1. ↑ https://www.math.uni-hamburg.de/home/collatz/zeichnungen.html

• Wikidata: Item Q61794, en:Wikipedia
• http://d-nb.info/gnd/118521543
• https://history-of-approximation-theory.com/people/collatz
• https://idref.fr/032399782
• https://mathgenealogy.org/id.php?id=20676
  • note: site is about the academic sense of 'genealogy'
• https://mathscinet.ams.org/mathscinet/MRAuthorID/50600
• https://mathshistory.st-andrews.ac.uk/Biographies/Collatz
• https://www.math.uni-hamburg.de/home/collatz/index.html
• https://zbmath.org/authors/?s=0&q=Collatz%2C+Lothar
• H Heinrich, Zum siebzigsten Geburtstag von Lothar Collatz, Z. Angew. Math. Mech. 60 (5) (1980), 274-275.
• In memoriam
  • G Meinardus, G Nürnberger, Th Riessinger and G Walz, In memoriam : the work of Lothar Collatz in approximation theory, J. Approx. Theory 67 (2) (1991), 119-128.
  • G Meinardus and G Nürnberger, In memoriam : Lothar Collatz (July 6, 1910-September 26, 1990), J. Approx. Theory 65 (1) (1991), i; 1-2.
  • J R Whiteman, In memoriam : Lothar Collatz, Internat. J. Numer. Methods Engrg. 31 (8) (1991), 1475-1476.