David Hilbert

David Hilbert was born on 23 January 1862 near Konigsberg, Prussia, and died on 14 February 1943 in Gottingen, Germany. He rose from Privatdozent to professor at Konigsberg before accepting the mathematics chair at Gottingen in 1895, where he remained for the rest of his career, retiring in 1930 and largely withdrawing from public life after the Nazi dismissals of Jewish colleagues in 1933. His 1899 Grundlagen der Geometrie set out a complete system of axioms for Euclidean geometry, refounding the subject on a rigorous logical basis. In 1900, at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Paris, he posed twenty-three unsolved problems intended to guide the coming century of mathematical research, including the continuum hypothesis and the Riemann hypothesis. His 1888 finite basis theorem in invariant theory proved existence abstractly rather than by explicit construction, and his work on integral equations introduced the infinite-dimensional spaces later named Hilbert spaces, foundational to functional analysis and, later, quantum mechanics. In 1915 he and Felix Klein invited Emmy Noether to Gottingen.