Bertram Huppert


Bertram Huppert is a German mathematician specializing in group theory and the representation theory of finite groups. His Endliche Gruppen is an influential textbook in group theory, and he has over 50 doctoral descendants.

Life

Education

Bertram Huppert went to school in Bonn from 1934 until 1945. In 1950, he wrote his diploma thesis in mathematics at the University of Mainz. The thesis discussed "nicht fortsetzbare Potenzreihen", and was written under the direction of Helmut Wielandt.
When Wielandt moved to the University of Tübingen in April 1951, Huppert followed him later in the year, and gained his doctorate with the work "Produkte von paarweise vertauschbaren zyklischen Gruppen", in which he showed, among other things, that such groups were supersoluble. This was the first of more than forty further scientific works, not including his books and monographs. The focus of the dissertation was very close to Wielandt's interests at the time, whose 1951 work shows that the product of pairwise permutable nilpotent groups is solvable.

Academic career

Huppert spent the years 1963/64 as a visiting professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. In January 1965, he became a professor of pure mathematics at the University of Mainz, where he later became a professor emeritus in 1994. He put a lot of effort into building up the Mainz group theory and abstract algebra research groups.
Following an assignment, he wrote a monumental standard text in the theory of finite groups, Endliche Gruppen I. The group around Wolfgang Gaschütz in Kiel provided important contributions in discussions to that volume. Volumes II and III appeared 14 years later in English with co-author Norman Blackburn.
In 1984, Huppert founded, together with Gerhard Michler, the first Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft priority programme in Mathematics at the German universities of Aachen, Bielefeld, Essen and Mainz.
From 1964 to 1985, Huppert was a member of the editorial board of the Journal of Algebra. Together with Wolfgang Gaschütz and Karl W. Gruenberg, he organised Oberwolfach workshops on group theory over many years, and with Michler the Oberwolfach workshop on representation theory.
He was a founding member of the Institute of Experimental Mathematics of the University of Essen and is a member of the Akademie gemeinnütziger Wissenschaften zu Erfurt.

Selected bibliography