Adolf Hurwitz - Educational Career

Educational Career

Hurwitz entered the University of Munich in 1877, aged 17. He spent one year there attending lectures by Klein, before spending the academic year 1877–1878 at the University of Berlin where he attended classes by Kummer, Weierstrass and Kronecker, after which he returned to Munich.

In October 1880, Felix Klein moved to the University of Leipzig. Hurwitz followed him there, and became a doctoral student under Klein's direction, finishing a dissertation on elliptic modular functions in 1881. Following two years at the University of Göttingen, in 1884 he was invited to become an Extraordinary Professor at the Albertus Universität in Königsberg; there he encountered the young David Hilbert and Hermann Minkowski, on whom he had a major influence. Following the departure of Frobenius, Hurwitz took a chair at the Eidgenössische Polytechnikum Zürich (today the ETH Zürich) in 1892 (having to turn down a position at Göttingen shortly after ), and remained there for the rest of his life.

Throughout his time in Zürich, Hurwitz suffered from continual ill health, which had been originally caused when he contracted typhoid whilst a student in Munich. He suffered from severe migraines, and then in 1905, his kidneys became diseased and he had one removed.