Ferdinand Georg Frobenius

Ferdinand Georg Frobenius (26 October 1849 – 3 August 1917) was a German mathematician, best known for his contributions to the theory of elliptic functions, differential equations, number theory, and to group theory. He is known for the famous determinantal identities, known as Frobenius–Stickelberger formulae, governing elliptic functions, and for developing the theory of biquadratic forms. He was also the first to introduce the notion of rational approximations of functions (nowadays known as Padé approximants), and gave the first full proof for the Cayley–Hamilton theorem. He also lent his name to certain differential-geometric objects in modern mathematical physics, known as Frobenius manifolds.

Ferdinand Georg Frobenius was born on 26 October 1849 in Charlottenburg, a suburb of Berlin, from parents Christian Ferdinand Frobenius, a Protestant parson, and Christine Elizabeth Friedrich. He entered the Joachimsthal Gymnasium in 1860 when he was nearly eleven.

In 1867, after graduating, he went to the University of Göttingen, where he began his university studies. However, he studied there for only one semester before returning to Berlin, where he attended lectures by Leopold Kronecker, Ernst Kummer and Karl Weierstrass. He received his doctorate (awarded with distinction) in 1870 supervised by Weierstrass. His thesis was on the solution of differential equations. In 1874, after having taught at secondary school level — first at the Joachimsthal Gymnasium, then at the Sophienrealschule — he was appointed to the University of Berlin as an extraordinary professor of mathematics.

Frobenius was in Berlin only a year before he went to Zürich to take up an appointment as an ordinary professor at the Eidgenössische Polytechnikum. For seventeen years, between 1875 and 1892, Frobenius worked in Zürich. It was there that he married, brought up his family, and did much important work in widely differing areas of mathematics.

In the last days of December 1891, Kronecker died, and therefore his chair in Berlin became vacant. Weierstrass, strongly believing that Frobenius was the right person to keep Berlin in the forefront of mathematics, used his considerable influence to have Frobenius appointed. In 1893 he returned to Berlin, where he was elected to the Prussian Academy of Sciences.

Group theory was one of Frobenius' principal interests in the second half of his career. One of his first contributions was the proof of the Sylow theorems for abstract groups. Earlier proofs had been for permutation groups. His proof of the first Sylow theorem (on the existence of Sylow groups) is one of those frequently used today.

Many years ago this conjecture was proved correct for solvable groups. Only in 1991, after the classification of finite simple groups, was this problem solved in general.

More important was his creation of the theory of group characters and group representations, which are fundamental tools for studying the structure of groups. This work led to the notion of Frobenius reciprocity and the definition of what are now called Frobenius groups. A group G is said to be a Frobenius group if there is a subgroup H < G such that