Peter Dembowski


Heinz Peter Dembowski was a German mathematician, specializing in combinatorics. He is known for the and for Dembowski-Ostrom polynomials.

Education and career

Dembowski studied from 1948 to 1953 at Goethe University Frankfurt. He then spent three years in the USA first at Brown University and then at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign. At Illinois he met Reinhold Baer, with whom he returned to Frankfurt in 1956 and received in 1957 his doctorate with thesis Verallgemeinerungen von Transitivitätsklassen endlicher projektiver Ebenen. In 1964 Dembowski was habilitated in Frankfurt. He was a visiting professor in 1962/3 at Queen Mary College in London, in 1965/66 at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, and in 1966/67 at the University of Illinois at Chicago. He was in the spring of 1965 a visiting professor at the University of Rome. In 1969 he was appointed to a professorial chair at the University of Tübingen, where he remained until his death in 1971.
The primary focus of Dembowski's research was finite geometries and their interrelations with group theory, about which he wrote an authoritative textbook. He proved the theorem, famous in finite geometry, that every inversive plane of even order n is isomorphic to the system of points and plane sections of an ovoid in a three-dimensional projective space over GF.
In 1962 he was an approved speaker with half-hour talk Partial planes with parallelism at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Stockholm.
His doctoral students include William Kantor.

Selected publications