Friederich Ignaz Mautner (14 May 1921–2002)Biographical information from Kühler Abschied - Wien 1938 und der Exodus der Mathematik, Ausstellung der Österreichischen Mathematischen Gesellschaft in der Universität Wien 2001 was an Austrian-American mathematician, known for his research on the representation theory of groups, functional analysis, and differential geometry. He is known for Mautner's Lemma and Mautner's Phenomenon in the representation theory of Lie groups.
Life and career Following the Anschluss in 1938, Mautner, a Jew, emigrated from Austria to the UK where he became one of the thousands or refugees who were interred by the British and shipped off to Hay Camp 7 in Australia. While there he was fortunate in that he got to study mathematics under Felix Behrend. When he got back to the UK, he garnered a BSc at Durham University and then went to Ireland in 1944 where he got an assistantship with Paul Ewald at Queens University Belfast (QUB).An Irish Sanctuary by Gisela Holfter and Horst Dickel, Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin, p. 344, ISBN 978-3-11-035144-6 He then became a scholar at the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies in 1944–1946.Mautner, F.I. 1944–46 Scholar, Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies
He then moved to the USA, where he was a visiting scholarHe would again be at the IAS in 1954-56 and in 1965-66. at the Institute for Advanced Study (IAS) in Princeton (1946-47).Mautner, Friederich I., Institute for Advanced Study
He then attended Princeton University and got a Ph.D. in 1948 with the thesis Unitary Representations of Infinite Groups.
He was a Guggenheim Fellow at Johns Hopkins University in the academic year 1954-55.Friederich I. Mautner; Fellow: Awarded 1954; Field of Study: Mathematics John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation
Working in the fields of ergodic theory of geodesic flows, he published a paper in 1957 that established the lemma and the phenomenon that bear his name.Mautner Geodesic flows on symmetric Riemannian spaces, Annals of Mathematics, vol. 65, 1957, pp. 416-430
He published a ground-breaking paper in 1958 that established him as a pioneer in the representation theory of reducible p-adic groups.Mautner Spherical functions over p-adic fields. I, Amer. J. Math. 80 (1958), 441–457; Part 2 appeared 6 years later in Amer. J. Math., vol. 86, 1964, S. 171-200
The Mautner Group, a special five-dimensional Lie group, is named after him.Baggett, Merrill Representations of the Mautner group and cocycles of an irrational rotation Michigan Math. J., vol. 33, 1986, 221-229
Frederich had one daughter, Jean Mautner.
Selected works
with L. Ehrenpreis:
with L. Ehrenpreis: with L. Ehrenpreis:
References