Otto Blumenthal (1876–1944) in retrospect Original Research Article

This paper treats in detail the life and work of Otto Blumenthal, one of the most tragic figures of the 188 emigré mathematicians from Germany and the Nazi-occupied continent. Blumenthal, the first doctoral student of David Hilbert, was crucial in the publication and communication system of German mathematics between the two World Wars. There has been an unusual revival of interest in his mathematical work in the last three decades. Thus his work on orthogonal polynomials whose zeros are dense in intervals, called the Blumenthal theorem by T.S. Chihara (1972), lead to over two dozen recent papers in the field. The Blumenthal–Nevai theorem, with applications to scattering theory in physics, is one example. In modern work on Hilbert modular forms, increasingly being called Hilbert–Blumenthal modular forms, many recent papers even contain the word Blumenthal in their titles. This paper contains 212 references.