Theodor Vahlen
Karl Theodor Vahlen (30 June 1869 in Vienna – 16 November 1945 in Prague) was a German mathematician and a proponent of the anti-Semitic "German Mathematics".
Born to Johannes Vahlen, an expert in ancient philology, Vahlen studied in Berlin in 1890, graduated in 1893 with the thesis "Contributions to an Additive Number Theory", and then after a short time in Königsberg (nowadays Kaliningrad, Russia), he became a full professor of mathematics in Greifswald, where he had already been teaching since 1904. Originally, he concerned himself with formalistic fields of mathematics such as number theory and the foundations of geometry. With his appointment in 1911 he applied himself – not least for philosophical reasons – to applied mathematics, and more precisely to its elementary construction and approximation methods.
In 1923, Vahlen joined the Greater German People's Party, an Austrian counterpart to the NSDAP. In 1924 he became a Nazi member of the Reichstag and the first Nazi Gauleiter in Pomerania, where he published a Nazi daily newspaper and led the Party to considerable electoral success. In 1927, however, publication was discontinued under Adolf Hitler's pressure, and Vahlen was dismissed as Gauleiter for belonging to the Strasser wing, a National Socialist group formed after the 1923 Beerhall Putsch with socialist leanings that distanced itself from Hitler, and was systematically purged from the Party after Hitler's release from prison in Landsberg am Lech. In the same year, Vahlen was dismissed without pension entitlement after a long trial in Greifswald because on Constitution Day 1924 he had had the Reich and Prussian flags at the university building taken down.
After a time in 1930 at the Vienna University of Technology and his rehabilitation in the Nazi Party, Vahlen could once more teach at the Ernst Moritz Arndt University of Greifswald and from 1934 to 1937 he led the office for sciences at the Reich Culture Ministry. In this position he could foster mathematician Ludwig Bieberbach's anti-Semitic endeavours around "German Mathematics". With Bieberbach he brought out a magazine with that same name – Deutsche Mathematik in German – in 1936. In 1937 Vahlen had to leave his office owing to his entanglement in the power struggles that led to Johannes Stark's ouster as president of the German Research Community. Stark was one of the main proponents of "German Physics", something of a counterpoint to the "German Mathematics" phenomenon.