Alfred Pringsheim - Family and Academic Career

Family and Academic Career

Alfred Pringsheim came from an extremely wealthy Silesian merchant family with Jewish roots. He was the first-born child and only son of the Upper Silesian railway entrepreneur and coal mine owner Rudolf Pringsheim (1821–1901) and his wife Paula, née Deutschmann (1827–1909). He had a younger sister, Martha.

Pringsheim attended the Maria Magdalena Gymnasium in Breslau, where he excelled in music and mathematics. Starting in 1868 he studied mathematics and physics in Berlin and at the Ruprecht Karl University in Heidelberg. In 1872 he was awarded a doctorate in mathematics, studying under Leo Königsberger. In 1875 he moved from Berlin, where his parents lived, to Munich to earn his habilitation. Two years later he became a lecturer at Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich.

In 1886 he was appointed associate professor of mathematics there, and in 1901 full professor He retired as emeritus professor in 1922. He was elected a member of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences in 1898, a position he held until 1938, and was a corresponding member of the Göttingen Academy of Sciences. He was also awarded membership in the Leopoldina, Germany’s oldest academy of natural sciences.

Pringsheim considered himself to be a German citizen who no longer followed the "Mosaic belief" (meaning conservative or orthodox Judaism), but he repeatedly declined to have himself baptized.

In 1878 he married the Berlin actress Gertrude Hedwig Anna Dohm (1855–1942), whose mother was the famous Berlin advocate of women’s rights Hedwig Dohm (1831–1919). They had five children: Erik (* 1879), Peter (*1881), Heinz (*1882) and twins born in 1883, Klaus and Katharina, known as Katia. His first-born son, Erik, was exiled to Argentina because of his dissolute life and gambling debts and died there at an early age. His sons Peter and Klaus followed him in pursuing academic careers, obtaining professorships in physics and composition. Heinz became an archaeologist with a doctorate in that field. His daughter Katia was the first female in Munich to earn the qualifications for university admission and was one of the first active women students at Munich University. She later became the wife of the author and Nobel Prize winner Thomas Mann.

In 1889 he and his family moved into a Neo-Renaissance villa at Arcisstrasse 12 designed by the Berlin architects Kayser & von Großheim with interior furnishings provided by Joh. Wachter and the court furniture manufacturer O. Fritsche of Munich. On major social nights the Munich elite was hosted here in what was known as the Pringsheim Palace.

Besides mathematics, ever since his youth Pringsheim was also intensively occupied with music, and adapted various compositions of Richard Wagner for the piano. Later he became interested in the theory and history of art, building up important collections of majolica earthenware and paintings.

In his novel Königliche Hoheit, Thomas Mann portrayed his father-in-law as the character Samuel Spoelman.