caption doctoral_advisor death_date death_place birth_place nationality fields workplaces birth_date doctoral_students image article_title name alma_mater
eduard stiefel , 1955 heinz hopf 25 november 1978 zürich zürich swiss mathematics eth zürich 21 april 1909 corrado läuchli max rössler carl zehnder böhm jean descloux walter habicht peter henrici peter eduard stiefel eth-bib portr 00817.jpg eduard stiefel
 eduard stiefel eth zürich
eduard stiefel

eduard l. stiefel -lrb- 21 april 1909 -- 25 november 1978 -rrb- was a swiss mathematician .
together with cornelius lanczos and magnus hestenes , he invented the conjugate gradient method , and gave what is now understood to be a partial construction of the stiefel -- whitney classes of a real vector bundle , thus co-founding the study of characteristic classes .
stiefel entered the swiss federal institute of technology in 1928 .
he received his ph.d. in 1935 under heinz hopf ; his dissertation was titled `` richtungsfelder und fernparallelismus in n-dimensionalen mannigfaltigkeiten '' .
stiefel completed his habilitation in 1942 .
besides his academic pursuits , stiefel was also active as a military officer , rising to the rank of colonel in the swiss army during world war ii .
stiefel achieved his full professorship at eth zurich in 1948 , the same year he founded the institute for applied mathematics .
the objective of the new institute was to design and construct an electronic computer -lrb- the `` elektronische rechenmaschine der eth '' , or ermeth -rrb- .
he spent a year in the united states commencing in august , 1951 .
during this time , he met magnus hestenes and many other scientists at the national bureau of standards and these professional associations served him well during the remainder of his career at zurich .
