Gustav Doetsch

Dr. Gustav Doetsch (November 29, 1892 – June 9, 1977) was a German mathematician, aviation researcher, decorated war veteran, and Nazi supporter.

Doetsch was born into a strict Catholic family on November 29, 1892 in Cologne. From 1904 to 1911 he attended Wohler High School in Frankfurt, going on to attend the universities at Göttingen, Munich, and Berlin between 1911 and 1914, studying mathematics, physics and philosophy.

With the outbreak of World War I, his studies were interrupted when he joined the army in October 1914. Serving in the infantry for two years, in 1916 he moved to the air force where he served as an aerial observer. In 1918 he was discharged, having received the Iron Cross and position of second-lieutenant.

He returned to his studies, completing his doctorate at Göttingen in 1920 with the thesis Eine neue Verallgemeinerung der Borelschen Summabilitätstheorie der divergenten Reihen. In 1921 he completed his habilitation thesis at the Technical University of Hannover.

From 1922 to 1924 he lectured at the University of Halle. Following that he became a professor at the Technical University of Stuttgart. He was offered the chair of mathematics position at the University of Greifswald and University of Giessen, which he declined, before accepting the mathematics chair position at the University of Freiburg in 1931.

The modern formation and permanent structure of the Laplace transform is found in Doetsch's 1937 work Theorie und Anwendung der Laplace-Transformation, which was well-received internationally. He dedicated most of his research and scientific activity to the Laplace transform, and his books on the subject became standard texts throughout the world, translated into several languages. His texts were the first to apply the Laplace transform to engineering.

...
Wikipedia