David Hilbert
1862–1943, Wehlau, Prussia (now Znamensk, Kaliningrad Oblast, Russia), Göttingen, Germany
German mathematician, one of the most influential of the 20th century, who gave modern geometry a rigorous axiomatic foundation, developed Hilbert spaces, and set the agenda for a century of research with his 23 problems of 1900.
Hilbert grew up in Königsberg and studied at its university, where he formed a lasting friendship with Hermann Minkowski. He proved his celebrated Basis Theorem in invariant theory in 1888 using a radically abstract, non-constructive approach that initially drew scepticism from Paul Gordan, the leading expert in the field, but was championed by Felix Klein. In 1895 Hilbert moved to the University of Göttingen at Klein's invitation, remaining there for the rest of his career and turning it into the world's leading centre for mathematics.
In 1899 Hilbert published Grundlagen der Geometrie, giving Euclidean geometry a rigorous axiomatic foundation for the first time since Euclid. At the 1900 International Congress of Mathematicians in Paris he presented 23 unsolved problems — including the continuum hypothesis, Goldbach's conjecture and the Riemann hypothesis — that shaped mathematical research throughout the 20th century. His later work on integral equations led to the concept of Hilbert space, foundational for quantum mechanics, and in the 1920s he championed 'Hilbert's programme' to place all of mathematics on a finite, consistent axiomatic footing, a goal shown to be unattainable by Gödel's incompleteness theorems in 1931. Forced into retirement's shadow as the Nazis dismissed Jewish colleagues from Göttingen in 1933, he died there in 1943.
Workplaces: University of Königsberg, University of Göttingen
Germany