Felix Christian Klein (; German: [klaɪn]; 25 April 1849 – 22 June 1925) was a German mathematician, mathematics educator and historian of mathematics, known for his work in group theory, complex analysis, non-Euclidean geometry, and the associations between geometry and group theory. His 1872 Erlangen program classified geometries by their basic symmetry groups and was an influential synthesis of much of the mathematics of the time.
During his tenure at the University of Göttingen, Klein was able to turn it into a center for mathematical and scientific research through the establishment of new lectures, professorships, and institutes. His seminars covered most areas of mathematics then known as well as their applications. Klein also devoted considerable time to mathematical instruction and promoted mathematics education reform at all grade levels in Germany and abroad. He became the first president of the International Commission on Mathematical Instruction in 1908 at the Fourth International Congress of Mathematicians in Rome.
Felix Klein was born on 25 April 1849 in Düsseldorf, to Prussian parents. His father, Caspar Klein (1809–1889), was a Prussian government official's secretary stationed in the Rhine Province. His mother was Sophie Elise Klein (1819–1890, née Kayser). He attended the Gymnasium in Düsseldorf, then studied mathematics and physics at the University of Bonn, 1865–1866, intending to become a physicist. At that time, Julius Plücker had Bonn's professorship of mathematics and experimental physics, but by the time Klein became his assistant, in 1866, Plücker's interest was mainly geometry. Klein received his doctorate, supervised by Plücker, from the University of Bonn in 1868.
Plücker died in 1868, leaving his book concerning the basis of line geometry incomplete. Klein was the obvious person to complete the second part of Plücker's Neue Geometrie des Raumes, and thus became acquainted with Alfred Clebsch, who had relocated to Göttingen in 1868. Klein visited Clebsch the next year, along with visits to Berlin and Paris. In July 1870, at the beginning of the Franco-Prussian War, he was in Paris and had to leave the country. For a brief time he served as a medical orderly in the Prussian army before being appointed Privatdozent (lecturer) at Göttingen in early 1871.
The University of Erlangen appointed Klein professor in 1872, when he was only 23 years old. For this, he was endorsed by Clebsch, who regarded him as likely to become the best mathematician of his time. Klein did not wish to remain in Erlangen, where there were very few students, and was pleased to be offered a professorship at the Technische Hochschule München in 1875. There he and Alexander von Brill taught advanced courses to many excellent students, including Adolf Hurwitz, Walther von Dyck, Karl Rohn, Carl Runge, Max Planck, Luigi Bianchi, and Gregorio Ricci-Curbastro.
In 1875, Klein married Anne Hegel, granddaughter of the philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel.
After spending five years at the Technische Hochschule, Klein was appointed to a chair of geometry at Leipzig University. His colleagues included Walther von Dyck, Rohn, Eduard Study and Friedrich Engel. Klein's years at Leipzig, 1880 to 1886, fundamentally changed his life. In 1882, his health collapsed and he battled with depression for the next two years. Nevertheless, his research continued; his seminal work on hyperelliptic sigma functions, published between 1886 and 1888, dates from around this period.
Klein accepted a professorship at the University of Göttingen in 1886. From then on, until his 1913 retirement, he sought to re-establish Göttingen as the world's prime center for mathematics research. However, he never managed to transfer from Leipzig to Göttingen his own leading role as developer of geometry. He taught a variety of courses at Göttingen, mainly concerning the interface between mathematics and physics, in particular, mechanics and potential theory.
The research facility Klein established at Göttingen served as model for the best such facilities throughout the world. He introduced weekly discussion meetings, and created a mathematical reading room and library. In 1895, Klein recruited David Hilbert from the University of Königsberg. This appointment proved of great importance; Hilbert continued to enhance Göttingen's primacy in mathematics until his own retirement in 1932. Klein and Hilbert jointly invited Emmy Noether to Göttingen in 1915 where she introduced Einstein to group theory and the relationship between symmetries and conservation principles.
Under Klein's editorship, Mathematische Annalen became one of the best mathematical journals in the world. Founded by Clebsch, it grew under Klein's management, to rival, and eventually surpass Crelle's Journal, based at the University of Berlin. Klein established a small team of editors who met regularly, making decisions in a democratic spirit. The journal first specialized in complex analysis, algebraic geometry, and invariant theory. It also provided an
important outlet for real analysis and the new group theory.
In 1893, Klein was a major speaker at the International Mathematical Congress held in Chicago as part of the World's Columbian Exposition. Due partly to Klein's efforts, Göttingen began admitting women in 1893. He supervised the first Ph.D. thesis in mathematics written at Göttingen by a woman, by Grace Chisholm Young, an English student of Arthur Cayley's, whom Klein admired. In 1897, Klein became a foreign member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Around 1900, Klein began to become interested in mathematical instruction in schools. In 1905, he was instrumental in formulating a plan recommending that analytic geometry, the rudiments of differential and integral calculus, and the function concept be taught in secondary schools. This recommendation was gradually implemented in many countries around the world. In 1908, Klein was elected president of the International Commission on Mathematical Instruction at the Rome International Congress of Mathematicians. Under his guidance, the German part of the Commission published many volumes on the teaching of mathematics at all levels in Germany. In 1892 the Manchester Literary and Philosophical Society awarded Klein Honorary membership of the Society.
The London Mathematical Society awarded Klein its De Morgan Medal in 1893. He was elected a member of the Royal Society in 1885, and was awarded its Copley Medal in 1912. He retired the following year due to ill health, but continued to teach mathematics at his home for several further years.
Klein was one of ninety-three signatories of the Manifesto of the Ninety-Three, a document penned in support of the German invasion of Belgium in the early stages of World War I.
Klein's dissertation, on line geometry and its applications to mechanics, classified second degree line complexes using Weierstrass's theory of elementary divisors.
Klein's first important mathematical discoveries were made in 1870. In collaboration with Sophus Lie, he discovered the fundamental properties of the asymptotic lines on the Kummer surface. They later investigated W-curves, curves invariant under a group of projective transformations. It was Lie who introduced Klein to the concept of group, which was to have a major role in his later work. Klein also learned about groups from Camille Jordan.
Klein devised the "Klein bottle" named after him, a one-sided closed surface which cannot be embedded in three-dimensional Euclidean space, but it may be immersed as a cylinder looped back through itself to join with its other end from the "inside". It may be embedded in the Euclidean space of dimensions 4 and higher. The concept of a Klein Bottle was devised as a 3-Dimensional Möbius strip, with one method of construction being the attachment of the edges of two Möbius strips.