Georg Bohlmann went to school in
Berlin and
Leipzig and took his
Abitur at the
Wilhelms-Gymnasium in Berlin in 1888. After that, he began studying mathematics at the
University of Berlin under
Leopold Kronecker,
Lazarus Fuchs, and
Wilhelm Dilthey. As he advanced in his studies,
Lie groups became the focus of his interest. Since this area was poorly represented at Berlin, he moved to the
University of Halle, where he obtained his doctorate in 1892 under
Albert Wangerin with a dissertation on the topic
Ueber eine gewisse Klasse continuierlicher Gruppen und ihren Zusammenhang mit den Additionstheoremen ("On a certain class of continuous groups and their relation to addition theorems"). After that, he worked at the Meteorological Institute of Berlin, where presumably his interest in applied mathematics developed. At the invitation of
Felix Klein, he moved to the
University of Göttingen, where he
habilitated in 1894. In 1895, he was involved in starting a seminar on actuarial science at Göttingen. However, since he held no permanent position there, he went to Berlin in 1903 to work as the Chief Actuary for the German subsidiary of the New York Mutual Life Insurance Company. In 1901, he wrote the entry on life insurance mathematics in the
Enzyklopädie der mathematischen Wissenschaften ("Encyclopaedia of Mathematical Sciences") in which he gave
axioms for probability theory long before
Andrey Kolmogorov did so in 1933. In particular, he was the first to give the modern definition of
statistical independence. Compared to the current structure of probability theory, his work only lacked the technical condition of
sigma additivity. However, in contrast to Kolmogorov, Bohlmann failed to prove significant theorems within his axiomatic framework. As a result, his fundamental contributions to probability theory gained very little attention. In particular, though Kolmogorov had visited Göttingen several times in the late 1920s, he had no knowledge of Bohlmann's work. Bohlmann was an invited speaker in the
International Congress of Mathematicians in 1908 at Rome. == Publications ==