German mathematician and historian of mathematics
Norbert Schappacher (born 8 October 1950 in Essen) is a German mathematician and historian of mathematics. He was an Invited Speaker at the International Congress of Mathematicians in 2010 in Hyderabad.
Education and career.
After secondary education at Essen's "Burggymnasium", Schappacher studied from 1969 to 1971 at the University of Bonn, where he was taught by (among others) Günter Harder and Friedrich Hirzebruch. Schappacher obtained his "Vordiplom" in 1971 at the University of Göttingen, where he studied from 1971 to 1974 and was taught by (among others) Hans Grauert, Ulrich Stuhler, and Martin Kneser. For the academic year 1974–1975, Schappacher studied as an exchange student at the University of California, Berkeley, where his teachers included Tsit Yuen Lam and Robin Hartshorne. At the University of Göttingen, Schappacher received his "Diplom" in 1975 and from 1977 to 1986 held the position of assistant at the Göttingen Mathematical Institute. There in 1978 he received his doctorate with advisor Martin Kneser and thesis "Eine diophantische Invariante von Singularitäten über nichtarchimedischen Körpern" (A diophantine invariant of singularities over non-Archimedean fields).
He was from 1979 to 1981 at Paris-Sud University (University of Paris XI) in Orsay with John H. Coates and for the academic year 1983–1984 at the Max-Planck-Institut für Mathematik (MPI) in Bonn with Günter Harder. Schappacher in 1985 was an assistant professor ("Professeur associé") at Paris-Sud University and habilitated in 1986 at the University of Göttingen with thesis "Periods of Hecke operators". He was in 1986 at the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute (MSRI) in Berkeley, then worked in 1987 as an assistant professor in Orsay and was from 1987 to 1991 a Heisenberg fellow at the MPI in Bonn. He was at the Institute for Advanced Study for five months in 1990.
Schappacher is since 1991 a professor at the University of Strasbourg. From 2002 to 2004 he was a visiting professor at TU Darmstadt and returned in 2004 to the University of Strasbourg. He has held visiting positions at several academic institutions, including the Isaac Newton Institute (for 2 months in 1997), Mumbai's Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (for 2 months in 2000–2001), and the Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Göttingen (as Gauss-Professor in summer 2007). In 2011–2012 he was a Fellow of "Lichtenberg-Kolleg", Göttingen.
Schappacher's research is primarily on number theory, arithmetic geometry, and the history of mathematics. He has done research on the history of mathematics in Germany during the era of National Socialism (including Edmund Landau, Oswald Teichmüller and the Mathematical Institute in Göttingen), as well as historical research on Kurt Heegner, Bartel Leendert van der Waerden, Diophantus of Alexandria, and Leonhard Euler. Since 2008 Schappacher is a member of the Euler Committee of the Swiss Academy of Sciences. He was from 2009 to 2016 editor-in-chief of the "Revue d'histoire des mathématiques" and is the managing editor of the "Elemente der Mathematik".
In 2011 he was elected a corresponding member of the Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Göttingen.