Ernst Eduard Kummer (29 January 1810 - 14 May 1893) was a German mathematician. Highly skilled in applied mathematics, Kummer trained German army officers in ballistics; afterwards, he taught for 10 years in a Gymnasium (the German equivalent of high school), where he inspired the mathematical career of Leopold Kronecker.
Kummer was born in Sorau, Brandenburg (then part of Prussia). He retired from teaching and from mathematics in 1890 and died three years later in Berlin.
Read Barry Mazur's review of Ernst Edward Kummer, Collected Papers, by André Weil, free from Project Euclid.org. Kummer made several contributions to mathematics in different areas; he codified some of the relations between different hypergeometric series (contiguity relations). The Kummer surface results from taking the quotient of a two-dimensional abelian variety by the cyclic group {1, −1} (an early orbifold: it has 16 singular points, and its geometry was intensively studied in the nineteenth century).
Kummer and Fermat's last theorem
Kummer also proved Fermat's last theorem for a considerable class of prime exponents (see regular prime, ideal class group). His methods were closer, perhaps, to p-adic ones than to ideal theory as understood later, though the term 'ideal' arose here. He studied what were later called Kummer extensions of fields: that is, extensions generated by adjoining an nth root to a field already containing a primitive nth root of unity. This is a significant extension of the theory of quadratic extensions, and the genus theory of quadratic forms (linked to the 2-torsion of the class group). As such, it is still foundational for class field theory.
Kummer surface
Kummer also found the Kummer surface, which is a special case of Andre Weil's K3 surfaces (named after the peak in the Himalayas discovered around the time of Weil's work. Another explanation is that K3 stands for the trio of mathematicians Kummer, Kodaira, and Kähler). K3 surfaces are the Calabi-Yau manifolds of dimension two, and have played an important role in string theory.
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