page_title: David Hilbert
section_title: Career
hierarchical_section_title: David Hilbert / Life / Career
caption_attribution_description: Deutsch: Mathematisches Institut der Georg-August-Universität Göttingen, Bunsenstraße 3-5, Deutschland English: Faculty of mathematics, University of Göttingen, Bunsenstraße 3-5, Germany
context_page_description: David Hilbert was a German mathematician and one of the most influential and universal mathematicians of the 19th and early 20th centuries. Hilbert discovered and developed a broad range of fundamental ideas in many areas, including invariant theory, the calculus of variations, commutative algebra, algebraic number theory, the foundations of geometry, spectral theory of operators and its application to integral equations, mathematical physics, and foundations of mathematics.
  Hilbert adopted and warmly defended Georg Cantor's set theory and transfinite numbers. A famous example of his leadership in mathematics is his 1900 presentation of a collection of problems that set the course for much of the mathematical research of the 20th century.
  Hilbert and his students contributed significantly to establishing rigor and developed important tools used in modern mathematical physics. Hilbert is known as one of the founders of proof theory and mathematical logic.
context_section_description: In 1884, Adolf Hurwitz arrived from Göttingen as an Extraordinarius (i.e., an associate professor). An intense and fruitful scientific exchange among the three began, and Minkowski and Hilbert especially would exercise a reciprocal influence over each other at various times in their scientific careers. Hilbert obtained his doctorate in 1885, with a dissertation, written under Ferdinand von Lindemann, titled Über invariante Eigenschaften spezieller binärer Formen, insbesondere der Kugelfunktionen ("On the invariant properties of special binary forms, in particular the spherical harmonic functions").
  Hilbert remained at the University of Königsberg as a Privatdozent (senior lecturer) from 1886 to 1895.  In 1895, as a result of intervention on his behalf by Felix Klein, he obtained the position of Professor of Mathematics at the University of Göttingen. During the Klein and Hilbert years, Göttingen became the preeminent institution in the mathematical world. He remained there for the rest of his life.
caption: The Mathematical Institute in Göttingen. Its new building, constructed with funds from the Rockefeller Foundation, was opened by Hilbert and Courant in 1930.
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