Kurt Mahler

Kurt Mahler FRS (26 July 1903, Krefeld, Germany – 25 February 1988, Canberra, Australia) was a German mathematician who worked in the fields of transcendental number theory, diophantine approximation, p-adic analysis, and the geometry of numbers.

Mahler was a student at the universities in Frankfurt and Göttingen, graduating with a Ph.D. from Johann Wolfgang Goethe University of Frankfurt am Main in 1927; his advisor was Carl Ludwig Siegel.

He left Germany with the rise of Adolf Hitler and accepted an invitation by Louis Mordell to go to Manchester.

However, at the start of World War II he was interned as an enemy alien in Central Camp in Douglas, Isle of Man, where he met Kurt Hirsch, although he was released after only three months.

He became a British citizen in 1946.

Mahler held the following positions:

Mahler worked in a broad variety of mathematical disciplines, including transcendental number theory, diophantine approximation, p-adic analysis, and the geometry of numbers.

Mahler proved that the Prouhet–Thue–Morse constant and the Champernowne constant 0.1234567891011121314151617181920... are transcendental numbers.

He was elected a member of the Royal Society in 1948 and a member of the Australian Academy of Science in 1965.

He was awarded the London Mathematical Society's Senior Berwick Prize in 1950, the De Morgan Medal, 1971, and the Thomas Ranken Lyle Medal, 1977.

Mahler spoke fluent Japanese and was an expert photographer.

Mahler was the first to give an irrationality measure for pi, in 1953.

Although some have suggested the irrationality measure of pi is likely to be 2, the current best estimate is 7.103205334137…, due to Doron Zeilberger and Wadim Zudilin.