Heinrich Burkhardt


Heinrich Friedrich Karl Ludwig Burkhardt was a German mathematician. He famously was one of the two examiners of Albert Einstein's PhD thesis Eine neue Bestimmung der Moleküldimensionen. Of Einstein's thesis he stated: "The mode of treatment demonstrates fundamental mastery of the relevant mathematical methods" and "What I checked, I found to be correct without exception."

Biography

Burkhardt was born in Schweinfurt. Starting from 1879 he studied under Karl Weierstrass, Alexander von Brill, and Hermann Amandus Schwarz in Munich, Berlin and Göttingen. He attained a doctorate in 1886 in Munich under Gustav Conrad Bauer with a thesis entitled: Beziehungen zwischen der Invariantentheorie und der Theorie algebraischer Integrale und ihrer Umkehrungen.
In 1887 he was an assistant at Göttingen and obtained his habilitation there in 1889. Later he was a professor in Zürich and Munich. He worked on the theory of the elliptical functions, series expansions, group theory, the Burkhardt quartic, and history of mathematics.
He died in Neuwittelsbach/München, of a disease of the stomach, diagnosed about Easter 1914.

Works