Peter Roquette

Peter Roquette (born October 8 1927 in Königsberg) is a German mathematician working in algebraic geometry, algebra, and number theory.

Roquette studied in Erlangen, Berlin, and Hamburg. In 1951 he defended a dissertation at the University of Hamburg under Helmut Hasse, providing a new proof of the Riemann hypothesis for algebraic function fields over a finite field (the first proof was given by André Weil in 1940). In 1951/1952 he was an assistant at the Mathematical Research Institute at Oberwolfach and from 1952 to 1954 at the University of Munich. From 1954 to 1956 he worked at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. In 1954 he was Privatdozent at Munich, and from 1956 to 1959 he worked in the same position at Hamburg. In 1959 he became an associate professor at the University of Saarbrucken and in the same year at the University of Tübingen. From 1967 he was professor at the Ruprecht-Karls-University of Heidelberg, where he retired in 1996.

Roquette worked on number and function fields and especially local p-adic fields. He applied the methods of model theory (Nonstandard arithmetic) in number theory, joint with Abraham Robinson, with whom he worked on Mahler's theorem (on the finiteness of integral points on a curve of genus g> 0) using non-standard methods. He authored a number of works on the history of mathematics, in particular on the schools of Helmut Hasse and Emmy Noether. In 1975 Roquette was co-editor of the collected essays by Helmut Hasse.