[portrait]

HELMUT HASSE Return to Previous Screen
25 August 1898 - 26 December 1979

Helmut Hasse was not only an eminent mathematician, who left his mark on modern "Higher Arithmetic" with discoveries including the "Hasse Local-Global Principle", the "Hasse invariant", and "Hasse's Theorem" on the number of points of an elliptic curve over a finite field. He was also a prolific author to whom we owe several books and more than 200 articles. His collected mathematical papers fill three hefty volumes. (Our server's emblem, by the way, is based on the photograph serving as the frontispiece of the first volume.)

And he was a very gifted teacher, whose lectures and talks inspired an entire generation of young number theorists, far beyond the circle of his immediate students.

Hasse possessed an encyclopedic memory. His book "Über die Klassenzahl abelscher Zahlkörper" was written in the atrocious conditions of the post-war years, and he wrote it down from memory, without access to his notes or to a library!

(What is now known as "Hasse diagrams" in the theory of lattices and ordered sets is a legacy from the illustrations of this book.)

Hasse always endeavored to spread other mathematicians' results, to show how they fit into the grand picture, and to present them as clearly as possible. His colleagues knew and appreciated this, as the following anecdote shows (it is perhaps apocryphal but then it is well invented). A mathematician X, maybe it was Otto Schreier, is telling his friend Y of a result he has recently obtained.

Y: Ah, this is nice, you must publish this. Have you written it up yet?

X: Oh, I don't think it's worth the effort - I've sent a letter about this to Hasse, he'll be looking after it ...

 

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