# Who was Hermann Künneth?

Question as in the title:

Who was Hermann Künneth? Where can I find some biographical information beyond what is available on Wikipedia?

The well-known Künneth formula, for example in the form of exactness of the sequence $$0 \to \bigoplus_{p+q = n} H_p(C) \otimes H_q(D) \to H_n(C \otimes D) \to \bigoplus_{p+q=n-1}\operatorname{Tor}_1(H_p(C),H_q(D)) \to 0,$$ for complexes $C$ and $D$ of flat modules over a PID appears prominently in essentially every book on homological algebra and algebraic topology. Of course, Künneth formulated his insight in terms of Betti numbers, not in terms of homology groups.

Nevertheless, biographical information on its originator seems relatively hard to find.

Wikipedia links to Haupt's 5 page obituary in German which mainly focuses on Künneth's mathematics with only a few lines dedicated to his life.

Any further pointers would be appreciated.

-
I now asked this question on mathoverflow: mathoverflow.net/questions/114215 – Simon Nov 23 '12 at 6:47
If you have access to any large databases, such as those available at universities, you could try there. Sometimes other schools or workplaces have them available, or you could login and maybe pay to use them yourself. Many of them have older articles available for free. You could try the IEEE databases or Ebsco MegaFILE. IEEE has a lot of data on math and computers, while Ebsco has a little bit of everything. Another useful one is ProQuest, and you could try First Monday, which is free. – Hosch250 Nov 21 '13 at 18:12

## 1 Answer

I found some links that may be of use:

https://eudml.org/doc/146661 The above link is from the European Digital Mathematics Library

http://gdz.sub.uni-goettingen.de/dms/load/img/?PPN=GDZPPN002137240&IDDOC=248099 The above link is an article about him from the first link.

He was German and as I kind of expected, you need to understand German to read it. Essentially most of his info is written in German. I think that's the best you can get. (He died in 1975)

-