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Heinrich Maschke's father was an important medical man. Heinrich attended the Gymnasium in Breslau where he showed great ability. He entered the University of Heidelberg in 1872, studying there under Königsberger.
Military service was required at that time so Maschke spent a year in the army before he continued his studies at the University of Berlin. At Berlin he was taught by some outstanding mathematical teachers including Weierstrass, Kummer and Kronecker. In common with the standard practice of the time he moved around different German universities, next going to Göttingen from where he received his doctorate in 1880.
His first teaching post was in the Luisenstädtische Gymnasium in Berlin. He then returned to Göttingen for the years 1886-87 working with Klein. He returned to the Gymnasium in Berlin, then began part-time study of electrotechnics at the Polytechnicum in Charlottenburg. In 1890 he resigned his teaching post and took up full-time technical training.
In 1891 Maschke emigrated to the USA and worked for a year with the Western Electrical Instrument Company, Newark, New Jersey. However he returned to mathematics and he was appointed professor of mathematics at the University of Chicago when the university first opened in 1892.
Under Klein's inspiration while at Göttingen, Maschke had worked in group theory, in particular working on finite groups of linear transformations. He is best known today for Maschke's theorem which states that if the order of the finite group G is not divisible by the characteristic of the field K, then the (finite-dimensional) K-representations of G are completely reducible.
Maschke's second area of work was on differential geometry in particular the theory of quadratic differential quantics. In this area he led the symbolic treatment of the subject.
At Chicago, together with Eliakim Moore, Maschke was responsible for the rapid rise to eminence of the University in mathematics research. David Eugene Smith writing in [4] says:-
He devoted the remainder of his life to the training of mathematicians and to assisting in building up and maintaining a strong department in that university. He was a teacher of great ability and his courses were made more valuable by his all-round culture, by his originality of thought, and by his personal interest in the large numbers of young mathematicians who attended his lectures.
Texto original por: J J O'Connor and E F Robertson
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| JOC/EFR January 1997 | School of
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