Winfried Scharlau
Winfried Scharlau is a German mathematician.Biography
Scharlau received his doctorate in 1967 from the University of Bonn. His doctoral thesis Quadratische Formen und Galois-Cohomologie was supervised by Friedrich Hirzebruch. Scharlau was at the Institute for Advanced Study for the academic year 1969–1970 and in spring 1972. From 1970 he was a professor at the University of Münster, where he has now retired.
Scharlau's research deals with number theory and, in particular, the theory of quadratic forms, about which he wrote a 1985 monograph Quadratic and Hermitian Forms in Springer's series Grundlehren der mathematischen Wissenschaften.
Scharlau is also an amateur ornithologist and author of two novels, I megali istoria - die große Geschichte, set on the Greek island of Naxos, and Scharife , set on the island of Zanzibar in the 19th century. He also deals with the history of mathematics and wrote, with Hans Opolka, a historically-oriented introduction to number theory. Their book presents, among other topics, the analytical class number formula of Dirichlet and the geometry of the numbers in the 19th century. Scharlau wrote a multi-part biography of Alexander Grothendieck.
Scharlau is a corresponding member of the Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Göttingen. From 1991 to 1992 he was president of the Deutsche Mathematiker-Vereinigung. In 1974 he was invited speaker with talk On subspaces of inner product spaces at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Vancouver.
He is the father of the cognitive psychologist Ingrid Scharlau.Selected publications
- with Friedrich Hirzebruch: Einführung in die Funktionalanalysis, BI, Mannheim 1971,,
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- with H.-G. Quebbemann and Manfred Schultz: , Journal of Algebra vol. 59, no. 2, 264-289 1979
- with Manfred Knebusch: , vol. 1. Birkhäuser, 1980
- with Hans Opolka: Von Fermat bis Minkowski. Eine Vorlesung über die Zahlentheorie und ihre Entwicklung. Springer, Berlin 1980
- Richard Dedekind 1831/1981. Vieweg, Braunschweig 1981
- Quadratic and Hermitian Forms. Grundlehren der Mathematischen Wissenschaften 270. Springer, Berlin 1985
- Mathematische Institute in Deutschland 1800–1945. Dokumente zur Geschichte der Mathematik. Vieweg, Braunschweig 1990
- Schulwissen Mathematik. Ein Überblick. Vieweg, Braunschweig 1994
- Beiträge zur Vogelwelt der südlichen Ägäis. Verlag C. Lienau, 1999
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- Mathematik für Naturwissenschaftler. LIT Verlag, Münster 2005
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