František Wolf

Who was František Wolf?

František Wolf was a Czech mathematician known for his contributions to trigonometry and mathematical analysis, specifically the study of the perturbation of linear operators.

Wolf was born 1904 in Prostějov, then part of the Austro-Hungarian empire and now part of the Czech Republic, the elder of two children of a furniture maker. He studied physics at Charles University in Prague, and then mathematics at Masaryk University in Brno under the supervision of Otakar Borůvka; he was awarded a doctorate in 1928. He then taught mathematics at the high school level until 1937, when he obtained a faculty position at Charles University. When the German army invaded Czechoslovakia in 1938, Wolf obtained an invitation to visit the Mittag-Leffler Institute in Sweden; he remained in Sweden as part of the underground resistance to the Germans until 1941 before emigrating to the United States. He taught at Macalester College for a year, and then joined the faculty of the University of California, Berkeley in 1942. At Berkeley, he was one of the co-founders of the Pacific Journal of Mathematics in 1951.