Ferdinand Georg Frobenius


Ferdinand Georg Frobenius 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, 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.

Biography

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 but he only studied there for one semester before returning to Berlin, where he attended lectures by Kronecker, Kummer and Karl Weierstrass. He received his doctorate in 1870 supervised by Weierstrass. His thesis, supervised by Weierstrass, 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 only in Berlin 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.

Contributions to 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 is one of those frequently used today.
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
In that case, the set
together with the identity element of G forms a subgroup which is nilpotent as John G. Thompson showed in 1959. All known proofs of that theorem make use of characters. In his first paper about characters, Frobenius constructed the character table of the group of order for all odd primes p. He also made fundamental contributions to the representation theory of the symmetric and alternating groups.

Contributions to number theory

Frobenius introduced a canonical way of turning primes into conjugacy classes in Galois groups over Q. Specifically, if K/Q is a finite Galois extension then to each prime p which does not ramify in K and to each prime ideal P lying over p in K there is a unique element g of Gal satisfying the condition g = xp for all integers x of K. Varying P over p changes g into a conjugate, so the conjugacy class of g in the Galois group is canonically associated to p. This is called the Frobenius conjugacy class of p and any element of
the conjugacy class is called a Frobenius element of p. If we take for K the mth cyclotomic field, whose Galois group over Q is the units modulo m, then for p not dividing m the Frobenius class in the Galois group is p mod m. From this point of view,
the distribution of Frobenius conjugacy classes in Galois groups over Q generalizes Dirichlet's classical result about primes in arithmetic progressions. The study of Galois groups of infinite-degree extensions of Q depends crucially on this construction of Frobenius elements, which provides in a sense a dense subset of elements which are accessible to detailed study.

Publications