Arthur Schoenflies

Arthur Schoenflies marks a history spot in Frankfurt, Germany, centred on a mathematician and university builder. His subjects included geometry, set theory, topology, and crystallography. Born in 1853 in Landsberg an der Warthe, he later became part of Frankfurt’s academic history. That birthplace is now Gorzów Wielkopolski in Poland.

His crystallographic work classified 230 space groups in 1891, giving researchers a framework for describing crystal structures. He published that system in Krystallsysteme und Krystallstruktur. The Schoenflies notation still describes crystallographic point groups, while his set theory work named the Heine-Borel theorem. One report on set theory ran to 250 pages. At the Academy for Social and Commercial Sciences in Frankfurt, he became professor in 1911. He helped found the University of Frankfurt in 1914. There, he became the first dean of the science faculty and helped establish its first mathematics department. He later served as rector during 1920 to 1921.