Following the
Anschluss in 1938, Mautner, a Jew, emigrated from Austria to the UK where he became one of the thousands or refugees who were interred by the British and shipped off to
Hay Camp 7 in Australia. While there he was fortunate in that he got to study mathematics under
Felix Behrend. When he got back to the UK, he garnered a BSc at
Durham University and then went to Ireland in 1944 where he got an assistantship with Paul Ewald at
Queens University Belfast (QUB). He then became a scholar at the
Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies in 1944–1946. He then moved to the USA, where he was a visiting scholar at the
Institute for Advanced Study (IAS) in Princeton (1946-47). He then attended
Princeton University and got a Ph.D. in 1948 with the thesis
Unitary Representations of Infinite Groups. He was a
Guggenheim Fellow at
Johns Hopkins University in the academic year 1954-55. Working in the fields of
ergodic theory of
geodesic flows, he published a paper in 1957 that established the lemma and the phenomenon that bear his name. He published a ground-breaking paper in 1958 that established him as a pioneer in the
representation theory of reducible
p-adic groups. The Mautner Group, a special five-dimensional
Lie group, is named after him. Frederich had one daughter, Jean Mautner. ==Selected works==