Felix Hausdorff: ``We wish for you better times'' (Q2354126)

This extensive article is a useful presentation of research done in recent decades by various authors on the life and work of the influential German-Jewish mathematician Felix Hausdorff (1868--1942). Hausdorff, his wife and his sister-in-law committed suicide when threatened with deportation by the Nazis. The paper under review is mainly based on the careful edition of Hausdorff's ``Gesammelte Werke'' (Collected works) in 10 volumes which was started in the 1990s in Bonn (Germany), where Hausdorff died, and is now almost finished. In addition, the paper refers to a broad literature; the bibliography includes 77 titles. The biographical part of the essay (pp. 64--67) is much informed by a previous biographical paper [\textit{W. Purkert}, Math. Intell. 30, No. 4, 36--50 (2008; Zbl 1254.01038)]. In the much bigger second part of her paper, the author presents many important mathematical results of Hausdorff, published and unpublished, which are gathered in his ``Collected works''. The reader learns much about the details of Hausdorff's important work in set theory (in particular his famous ``Grundzüge'' of 1914), in measure theory, dimension theory (Hausdorff dimension!), probability and functional analysis. The particular merit is that the author draws broadly and in English on the extensive commentary in the work edition, which is mostly German as all papers by Hausdorff himself. As another user of the ``Collected works'' has aptly remarked, the commentary is not clearly identified in the tables of contents and thus will partly be missed by a ``casual perusal by monoglot English readers'' (J. Gray).