Paul Georg Funk (14 April 1886,

Vienna en, Viennese , iso_code = AT-9 , registration_plate = W , postal_code_type = Postal code , postal_code = , timezone = CET , utc_offset = +1 , timezone_DST ...

– 3 June 1969, Vienna) was an

Austria Austria, , bar, Östareich officially the Republic of Austria, is a country in the southern part of Central Europe, lying in the Eastern Alps. It is a federation of nine states, one of which is the capital, Vienna, the most populous c ...

mathematician A mathematician is someone who uses an extensive knowledge of mathematics in their work, typically to solve mathematical problems. Mathematicians are concerned with numbers, data, quantity, structure, space, models, and change. History O ...

who introduced the

Funk transform In the mathematical field of integral geometry, the Funk transform (also known as Minkowski–Funk transform, Funk–Radon transform or spherical Radon transform) is an integral transform defined by integrating a function on great circles of the sp ...

and who worked on the

calculus of variations The calculus of variations (or Variational Calculus) is a field of mathematical analysis that uses variations, which are small changes in functions and functionals, to find maxima and minima of functionals: mappings from a set of functions t ...

Biography

Born in Vienna in 1886, Paul Funk was the son of a deputy bank manager and went to high school in

Baden Baden (; ) is a historical territory in South Germany, in earlier times on both sides of the Upper Rhine but since the Napoleonic Wars only East of the Rhine. History The margraves of Baden originated from the House of Zähringen. Baden i ...

and

Gmunden Gmunden () is a town in Upper Austria, Austria in the district of Gmunden. It has 13,204 inhabitants (estimates 2016 ). It is much frequented as a health and summer resort, and has a variety of lake, brine, vegetable and pine-cone baths, a hydrop ...

. Then, studied mathematics in

Tübingen Tübingen (, , Swabian: ''Dibenga'') is a traditional university city in central Baden-Württemberg, Germany. It is situated south of the state capital, Stuttgart, and developed on both sides of the Neckar and Ammer rivers. about one in thr ...

Vienna en, Viennese , iso_code = AT-9 , registration_plate = W , postal_code_type = Postal code , postal_code = , timezone = CET , utc_offset = +1 , timezone_DST ...

, and

Göttingen Göttingen (, , ; nds, Chöttingen) is a university city in Lower Saxony, central Germany, the capital of the eponymous district. The River Leine runs through it. At the end of 2019, the population was 118,911. General information The or ...

, writing his PhD dissertation (''Über Flächen mit lauter geschlossenen geodätischen Linien'', 'On surfaces with many closed geodesic lines') under the supervision of

David Hilbert David Hilbert (; ; 23 January 1862 – 14 February 1943) was a German mathematician, one of the most influential mathematicians of the 19th and early 20th centuries. Hilbert discovered and developed a broad range of fundamental ideas in many a ...

. He got his PhD in 1911 and spent the interwar years (1915-1939) in

Prague Prague ( ; cs, Praha ; german: Prag, ; la, Praga) is the capital and largest city in the Czech Republic, and the historical capital of Bohemia. On the Vltava river, Prague is home to about 1.3 million people. The city has a tempera ...

as Professor of Mathematics at the . He became an associate professor in 1921 and a professor in 1927. Suspended from his professorship in 1939 on account of his being Jewish, Funk was deported to the

Theresienstadt concentration camp Theresienstadt Ghetto was established by the SS during World War II in the fortress town of Terezín, in the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia ( German-occupied Czechoslovakia). Theresienstadt served as a waystation to the extermination ca ...

in 1944, where he spent the last months of the war. He was freed in 1945 and became professor at

TU Wien TU Wien (TUW; german: Technische Universität Wien; still known in English as the Vienna University of Technology from 1975–2014) is one of the major universities in Vienna, Austria. The university finds high international and domestic recogn ...

. He died in Vienna on 3 June, 1969. He was buried at Neustift Cemetery.

Major publications

References

* * * *Maximilian Pinl: ''Kollegen in dunkler Zeit.'' Jahresbericht DMV Bd.75, 1974, S.172.

External links

* {{DEFAULTSORT:Funk, Paul 20th-century Austrian mathematicians 1886 births 1969 deaths Variational analysts Austro-Hungarian mathematicians Austrian Jews Theresienstadt Ghetto survivors