Friederich Ignaz Mautner

Life and career

Following the Anschluss in 1938, Mautner, a Jew, emigrated from Austria to the UK where he became one of the thousands or refugees who were interred by the British and shipped off to Hay Camp 7 in Australia. While there he was fortunate in that he got to study mathematics under Felix Behrend. When he got back to the UK, he garnered a BSc at Durham University and then went to Ireland in 1944 where he got an assistantship with Paul Ewald at Queens University Belfast (QUB). He then became a scholar at the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies in 1944–1946.

He then moved to the USA, where he was a visiting scholar at the Institute for Advanced Study (IAS) in Princeton (1946-47).

He then attended Princeton University and got a Ph.D. in 1948 with the thesis Unitary Representations of Infinite Groups.

He was a Guggenheim Fellow at Johns Hopkins University in the academic year 1954-55.

Working in the fields of ergodic theory of geodesic flows, he published a paper in 1957 that established the lemma and the phenomenon that bear his name.

He published a ground-breaking paper in 1958 that established him as a pioneer in the representation theory of reducible p-adic groups.

The Mautner Group, a special five-dimensional Lie group, is named after him.

Frederich had one daughter, Jean Mautner.