Friedrich Böhm (born 15 August 1885 in Harburg (Swabia) near Donauwörth, died 25 August 1965 in

Munich Munich is the capital and most populous city of Bavaria, Germany. As of 30 November 2024, its population was 1,604,384, making it the third-largest city in Germany after Berlin and Hamburg. Munich is the largest city in Germany that is no ...

) was a German actuarial and

insurance Insurance is a means of protection from financial loss in which, in exchange for a fee, a party agrees to compensate another party in the event of a certain loss, damage, or injury. It is a form of risk management, primarily used to protect ...

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, mathematical structure, structure, space, Mathematica ...

and university lecturer. During

World War II World War II or the Second World War (1 September 1939 – 2 September 1945) was a World war, global conflict between two coalitions: the Allies of World War II, Allies and the Axis powers. World War II by country, Nearly all of the wo ...

, Böhm was conscripted into Group IV of Inspectorate 7 (), an early cipher bureau and Signals intelligence agency of the

German Army (Wehrmacht) The German Army (, 'army') is the land component of the armed forces of Federal Republic of Germany, Germany. The present-day German Army was founded in 1955 as part of the newly formed West German together with the German Navy, ''Marine'' (G ...

(), working to decode foreign

Cipher In cryptography, a cipher (or cypher) is an algorithm for performing encryption or decryption—a series of well-defined steps that can be followed as a procedure. An alternative, less common term is ''encipherment''. To encipher or encode i ...

s. He would later work in the successor organization: General der Nachrichtenaufklärung, in a similar role.

Life

Friedrich Böhm studied

mathematics Mathematics is a field of study that discovers and organizes methods, Mathematical theory, theories and theorems that are developed and Mathematical proof, proved for the needs of empirical sciences and mathematics itself. There are many ar ...

at the Gymnasium St. Anna in Augsburg,

. In 1908 he undertook his promotion to Dr Phil with a thesis titled: ''Parabolic metric in the hyperbolic space''. Lindemann, who had already given lectures on Actuarial mathematics in Munich, drew his attention to questions of mortality and disability. In 1911, he enabled Böhm's Habilitation in this discipline. Böhm became a private lecturer and, following the example of the

University of Göttingen The University of Göttingen, officially the Georg August University of Göttingen (, commonly referred to as Georgia Augusta), is a Public university, public research university in the city of Göttingen, Lower Saxony, Germany. Founded in 1734 ...

( Georg Bohlmann ), founded a seminar on statistics and the insurance industry. During the 1911-12 winter term, he began delivering lectures on insurance mathematics. He had also taken the state exams as a teacher and was a student councillor. In 1920 he became an extraordinary professor of insurance

at the University of Munich, which he taught up to his retirement in 1955. He also taught other applications of mathematics in business. He remained for a long time the only actuarial science mathematician at the

Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich The Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich (simply University of Munich, LMU or LMU Munich; ) is a public university, public research university in Munich, Bavaria, Germany. Originally established as the University of Ingolstadt in 1472 by Duke ...

, and was only temporarily supported by the former director of Hamburger Feuerkasse, Paul Riebesell, who was appointed honorary professor in 1938 at the university. The successor of Böhm in Munich was Hans Richter, who in 1955 received an ordinariat () for mathematical statistics and economic mathematics. Böhm's two-volume textbook on actuarial science ''Versicherungsmathematik'' was widely disseminated.

Bibliography

* Insurance Mathematics: Elements of the insurance bill (German:Versicherungsmathematik : Elemente der Versicherungsrechnung), Series:Sammlung Göschen, Bd. 180, 3. Aufl., Berlin 1953 * Actuarial Mathematics: Life Insurance Mathematics (German:Lebensversicherungsmathematik Einführung in die technischen Grundlagen der Sozialversicherung, aus: Versicherungsmathematik, 2), series:Sammlung Göschen, Bd. 917/917a, 2. Aufl., Berlin 1953

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Bohm, Friedrich 1885 births 1965 deaths German cryptographers 20th-century German mathematicians Actuaries History of insurance