Horst Herrlich (11 September 1937, in

Berlin Berlin ( , ) is the capital and List of cities in Germany by population, largest city of Germany by both area and population. Its 3.7 million inhabitants make it the European Union's List of cities in the European Union by population within ci ...

– 13 March 2015, in Bremen) was a German mathematician, known as a pioneer of

categorical topology In mathematics, the category of topological spaces, often denoted Top, is the category whose objects are topological spaces and whose morphisms are continuous maps. This is a category because the composition of two continuous maps is again contin ...

Education and career

Horst Herrlich received his PhD in 1962 with thesis ''Ordnungsfähigkeit topologischer Räume'' (Orderability of topological spaces) under Karl Peter Grotemeyer and

Alexander Dinghas Alexander Dinghas (February 9, 1908 – April 19, 1974) was a Greek mathematician. Biography Dinghas was born on February 9, 1908, in Smyrna (now İzmir), Turkey. He did his schooling in Smyrna. He and his family moved to Athens in 1922. Dinghas ...

at the

Free University of Berlin The Free University of Berlin (, often abbreviated as FU Berlin or simply FU) is a public research university in Berlin, Germany. It is consistently ranked among Germany's best universities, with particular strengths in political science and t ...

, where he also received his habilitation in 1965 with a thesis on E-compact spaces (introduced by Stanisław Mrówka in 1958). From 1971 to 2002 Herrlich was a professor of mathematics with a focus on

general topology In mathematics, general topology is the branch of topology that deals with the basic set-theoretic definitions and constructions used in topology. It is the foundation of most other branches of topology, including differential topology, geometri ...

and category theory at the

University of Bremen The University of Bremen (German: ''Universität Bremen'') is a public university in Bremen, Germany, with approximately 23,500 people from 115 countries. It is one of 11 institutions which were successful in the category "Institutional Strategi ...

. He was part of the editorial staff for the third volume ''Deskriptive Mengenlehre und Topologie'' of the collected works of

Felix Hausdorff Felix Hausdorff ( , ; November 8, 1868 – January 26, 1942) was a German mathematician who is considered to be one of the founders of modern topology and who contributed significantly to set theory, descriptive set theory, measure theory, an ...

. He was an Invited Speaker of the International Congress of Mathematicians in 1974 in

Vancouver Vancouver ( ) is a major city in western Canada, located in the Lower Mainland region of British Columbia. As the List of cities in British Columbia, most populous city in the province, the 2021 Canadian census recorded 662,248 people in the ...

. He is regarded as a founder of categorical topology, which deals with general topology using the methods of category theory.

Selected publications

* * with George E. Strecker: * * * * with Jiří Adámek and George E. Strecker: *

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Herrlich, Horst 20th-century German mathematicians 21st-century German mathematicians Free University of Berlin alumni Academic staff of the University of Bremen 1937 births 2015 deaths