Erich Kähler was born in Leipzig, the son of a telegraph inspector Ernst Kähler. Inspired as a boy to be an explorer after reading books about
Sven Hedin that his mother Elsa Götsch had given to him, the young Kähler soon focused his passion for exploration on astronomy. He is said to have written a 50-page thesis on fractional differentiation while still in high school, hoping that it would earn him a PhD. His teachers replied that he would have to attend university courses first. Kähler enrolled in the
University of Leipzig in 1924. He read
Galois theory, met the mathematician
Emil Artin, and did research under the supervision of
Leon Lichtenstein. Still fascinated by celestial mechanics, Kähler wrote a dissertation entitled
On the existence of equilibrium solutions of rotating liquids, which are derived from certain solutions of the n-body problem, and received his
doctorate in 1928. He continued his studies at Leipzig for the following year, supported by fellowship from the
Notgemeinschaft der Deutschen Wissenschaften, except for a research assistantship at the
University of Königsberg in 1929. In 1930 Kähler joined the Department of Mathematics at the University of Hamburg to work under the direction of
Wilhelm Blaschke, writing a
habilitation thesis entitled, "About the integrals of algebraic equations". He took a year in Rome to work with Italian geometers including Enriques,
Castelnuovo,
Levi-Civita,
Severi, and
Segre in 1931-1932, Kähler returned to Hamburg after his year in Rome, where he continued to work until going to the
University of Konigsberg in 1935, and was offered an ordinary professorship a year later. In 1938 he married his first wife Luise Günther. After being stationed at the
Saint-Nazaire submarine base in German
Occupied France towards the end of the war, Kähler was captured by the Allies and taken to the prisoner of war camp at
Ile de Ré, and then to another camp in
Mulsanne. Thanks to the French physicist
Frederic Joliot-Curie and mathematician
Élie Cartan, Kähler was able to study mathematics during this time, receiving books and mathematics papers and working during his imprisonment. He was released in 1947. He reported that his oath to Hitler (as a civil servant) was important to him, and remained an apologist for the Third Reich decades later, in a 1988 interview with Sanford Segal. In 1964 he returned to the University of Hamburg to fill the post that opened when
Artin died in 1962. His wife Luise became ill and died in 1970, and Kähler married his second wife Charlotte Schulze, who was the widow of his brother who had died in the war. Kähler remained at the University of Hamburg until his retirement in 1974. After retiring Kähler remained an active researcher, writing a number of important papers on the foundations of physics and the Poincaré group, as well as a number of philosophical papers. ==Contributions==