Edmund Landau's Göttingen: From the life and death of a great mathematical center (Q1181855)

This is the reproduction of the author's talk given at the Dedication of the Edmund Landau Center for Research in Mathematical Analysis in Jerusalem, 28 February 1989. The first part deals with the life of the number theorist and function theorist Edmund Landau (1877-1938), who was expelled from his chair in Göttingen in 1933 as a Jew by joint efforts of Nazi students and the Prussian Ministry of Education. The second part gives a survey on the development of the Göttingen institute of mathematics until 1933 with an emphasis on the Nazi purge. This part is based partly on previous publications of the author [cf. \textit{H. Becker}, \textit{H.-J. Dahms} and \textit{C. Wegeler} (eds.): Die Universität Göttingen unter dem Nationalsozialismus, pp. 345-373 (München 1987)]. A letter of the famous function theorist and ardent Nazi Oswald Teichmüller (1913-1943) to Landau, dated November 3, 1933, in which he justifies the students' boycott, was not at the author's disposal in 1989. Meanwhile he has found this grotesque document and published it in: \textit{N. Schappacher} and \textit{E. Scholz} (eds.): Oswald Teichmüller --- Leben und Werk, Jahresber. Dtsch. Math.-Ver. 94, 1-39 (1992), pp. 28-30.