Early life and education Bertram Huppert was born in
Worms, Germany on 22 October 1927. He went to school in
Bonn from 1934 until 1945. In 1950, he wrote his diploma thesis in mathematics at the
University of Mainz. The thesis discussed "
nicht fortsetzbare Potenzreihen" (discontinuous
power series), and was written under the direction of
Helmut Wielandt. When Wielandt moved to the
University of Tübingen in April 1951, Huppert followed him later in the year, and gained his doctorate (as Wielandt's first doctoral student) with the work "
Produkte von paarweise vertauschbaren zyklischen Gruppen" (products of pairwise
permutable cyclic groups), in which he showed, among other things, that such groups were
supersoluble. This was the first of more than forty further scientific works, not including his books and
monographs. The focus of the dissertation was very close to Wielandt's interests at the time, whose 1951 work shows that the product of pairwise
permutable nilpotent groups is
solvable.
Academic career Huppert spent the years 1963/64 as a visiting professor at the
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and at the
California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in
Pasadena. In January 1965, he became a professor of pure mathematics at the University of Mainz, where he later became a
professor emeritus in 1994. He put a lot of effort into building up the Mainz
group theory and
abstract algebra research groups. Following an assignment, he wrote a monumental standard text in the theory of
finite groups,
Endliche Gruppen I. The group around
Wolfgang Gaschütz in
Kiel provided important contributions in discussions to that volume. Volumes II and III appeared 14 years later in English with co-author
Norman Blackburn. In 1984, Huppert founded, together with , the first
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft priority programme in Mathematics at the German universities of
Aachen,
Bielefeld,
Essen and
Mainz. From 1964 to 1985, Huppert was a member of the editorial board of the
Journal of Algebra. Together with
Wolfgang Gaschütz and
Karl W. Gruenberg, he organised
Oberwolfach workshops on group theory over many years, and with Michler the Oberwolfach workshop on representation theory. Huppert was a founding member of the Institute of Experimental Mathematics of the University of Essen and is a member of the
Akademie gemeinnütziger Wissenschaften zu Erfurt. ==Death==