Politics
Bieberbach supported the Nazi regime, and was enthusiastically involved in the efforts to dismiss his Jewish colleagues, including Edmund Landau and his former coauthor Schur, from their posts. Bieberbach was heavily influenced by Theodore Vahlen, another German mathematician and anti-Semite, who along with Bieberbach founded the "Deutsche Mathematik" ("German mathematics") movement and journal of the same name. The purpose of the movement was to encourage and promote a "German" (in this case meaning intuitionistic) style in mathematics. Bieberbach's and Vahlen's idea of having German mathematics was only part of a wider trend in the scientific community in Nazi Germany towards giving the sciences racial character; there were also pseudoscientific movements for "German physics", "German chemistry", and "German biology". In 1945, Bieberbach was dismissed from all his academic positions because of his support of Nazism, but in 1949 was invited to lecture at the University of Basel by Ostrowski, who considered Bieberbach's political views irrelevant to his contributions to the field of mathematics.
Read more about this topic: Ludwig Bieberbach
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