Werner Wolfgang Rogosinski, 1894-1964

Abstract

Werner Wolfgang Rogosinski, or Rogo as he was affectionately called by mathematicians all over the world, was born in Breslau on 24 September 1894. His father was Justizrat Hermann Rogosinski and his mother Helma née Braun. The family came originally from Poland and was clearly musical. Werner’s younger brother Kurt became a professional pianist, and Werner himself learnt the piano and the violin as a boy and always enjoyed playing the piano and listening to music. Werner had an orthodox schooling at the Gymnasium of St Maria Magdalena at Breslau from 1900 to 1913. This was a humanistic gymnasium with strong emphasis on Latin and Greek at which Werner excelled. There was little science and the mathematics course contained no calculus but plenty of geometry. Rogo was happy at school and considered that the training obtained there provided an excellent background for a future pure mathematician. He remained all his life strongly opposed to early specialization. Werner’s studies at Breslau, Freiburg im Breisgau and finally in Göttingen under Edmund Landau were interrupted by the First World War in which Werner served as a corporal in the medical corps or Sanitäter. He studied pure mathematics with some physics and philosophy but no applied mathematics. He had already at that time the interest in analytical problems and in particular in series, which never left him and where he did research of particular elegance and distinction. His Ph.D. thesis, for which he was awarded the degree on 25 January 1922, solved a very intractable problem, which had puzzled Landau, himself no mean analyst. Rogo did the work in a fortnight and from this time he started being well known in the mathematical world.