Otto Toeplitz (1 August, 1881- 15 February, 1940) was a leading German born mathematician, working on infinite linear and quadratic forms. He was a professor at Bonnfrom 1928 until 1935, when he was removed from office by the Nazis because he was Jewish. He emigrated to Palestine in 1939, and died in Jerusalem.

Work

In the 1930s he developed a general theory of infinite dimensional spaces and criticized Banach's work as being too abstract.

He wrote a radical calculus textbook, The Calculus: A Genetic Approach, ISBN: 978-0-88385-366-8, which introduces the subject by his "genetic method", namely by giving an idealized historical narrative to motivate the concepts: rather than simply giving the results, the answers, he gives the questions and problems that motivated the development of the theories, showing how they developed from classical problems of Ancient Greek mathematics.

He is also responsible for proposing the Inscribed Square Problem in 1911, namely asking whether every Jordan curve contains four points that define a square. Although partial results have been achieved (for example that it is true for any 'nice' curve that can be physically drawn), to this day it still has not been completely resolved.

See also

• Calderón–Toeplitz operator
• Silverman-Toeplitz theorem
• Hellinger-Toeplitz theorem
• Toeplitz matrix

References

1. Walter Stromquist, Inscribed squares and square-like quadrilaterals in closed curves, Mathematika 36: 187-197 (1989).

External links