Ferdinand Georg Frobenius

Ferdinand Georg Frobenius
Ferdinand Georg Frobenius
Born	(1849-10-26)26 October 1849 Charlottenburg, Berlin
Died	3 August 1917(1917-08-03) (aged 67) Berlin
Nationality	German
Fields	Mathematics
Institutions	University of Berlin ETH Zurich
Alma mater	University of Göttingen University of Berlin
Doctoral advisor	Karl Weierstrass Ernst Kummer
Doctoral students	Richard Fuchs Edmund Landau Issai Schur Konrad Knopp Walter Schnee
Known for	Differential equations Group theory Cayley–Hamilton theorem Frobenius method Frobenius matrix

Ferdinand Georg Frobenius (26 October 1849 – 3 August 1917) was a German mathematician, best known for his contributions to the theory of elliptic functions, differential equations and to group theory. He is known for the famous determinantal identities, known as Frobenius–Stickelberger formulae, governing elliptic functions, and for developing the theory of biquadratic forms. He was also the first to introduce the notion of rational approximations of functions (nowadays known as Padé approximants), and gave the first full proof for the Cayley–Hamilton theorem. He also lent his name to certain differential-geometric objects in modern mathematical physics, known as Frobenius manifolds.

Ferdinand Georg Frobenius was born on 26 October 1849 in Charlottenburg, a suburb of Berlin from parents Christian Ferdinand Frobenius, a Protestant parson, and Christine Elizabeth Friedrich. He entered the Joachimsthal Gymnasium in 1860 when he was nearly eleven. In 1867, after graduating, he went to the University of Göttingen where he began his university studies but he only studied there for one semester before returning to Berlin, where he attended lectures by Kronecker, Kummer and Karl Weierstrass. He received his doctorate (awarded with distinction) in 1870 supervised by Weierstrass. His thesis, supervised by Weierstrass, was on the solution of differential equations. In 1874, after having taught at secondary school level first at the Joachimsthal Gymnasium then at the Sophienrealschule, he was appointed to the University of Berlin as an extraordinary professor of mathematics. Frobenius was only in Berlin a year before he went to Zürich to take up an appointment as an ordinary professor at the Eidgenössische Polytechnikum. For seventeen years, between 1875 and 1892, Frobenius worked in Zürich. It was there that he married, brought up his family, and did much important work in widely differing areas of mathematics. In the last days of December 1891 Kronecker died and, therefore, his chair in Berlin became vacant. Weierstrass, strongly believing that Frobenius was the right person to keep Berlin in the forefront of mathematics, used his considerable influence to have Frobenius appointed. In 1893 he returned to Berlin, where he was elected to the Prussian Academy of Sciences.