Friedrich Hartogs


Friedrich Moritz "Fritz" Hartogs was a German-Jewish mathematician, known for his work on set theory and foundational results on several complex variables.

Life

Hartogs was the son of the merchant Gustav Hartogs and his wife Elise Feist and grew up in Frankfurt am Main.
He studied at the Königliche Technische Hochschule Hannover, at the Technische Hochschule Charlottenburg, at the University of Berlin, and at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, graduating with a doctorate in 1903.
As a Jew, he suffered greatly under the Nazi regime: he was fired in 1935, was mistreated and briefly interned in KZ Dachau in 1938, and eventually committed suicide in 1943.

Work

Hartogs main work was in several complex variables where he is known for
Hartogs's theorem, Hartogs's lemma and the concepts of holomorphic hull and domain of holomorphy.
In set theory, he contributed to the theory of wellorders and proved what is also known as Hartogs's theorem: for every set x there is a wellordered set that cannot be injectively embedded in x.
The smallest such set is known as the Hartogs number or Hartogs Aleph of x.