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Heinrich-Wolfgang Leopoldt (22 August 1927 – 28 July 2011) was a German mathematician who worked on algebraic number theory.

Leopoldt earned his Ph.D. in 1954 at the University of Hamburg under Helmut Hasse with the thesis Über Einheitengruppe und Klassenzahl reeller algebraischer Zahlkörper (On group of unity and class number of real algebraic number fields). As a postdoc, he was from 1956 to 1958 at the Institute for Advanced Study. In 1959, he obtained his habilitation degree at the University of Erlangen and was then at the University of Tübingen. From 1964, he was ordentlicher Professor at the University of Karlsruhe, where he was also Director of the Mathematics Institute.

Leopoldt and Tomio Kubota introduced and investigated p-adic L-functions (now named after them). These functions are a component of Iwasawa theory and are a p-adic version of the Dirichlet L-functions. With Hans Zassenhaus he also worked on computer algebra and its applications in number theory.

Leopoldt and Peter Roquette edited the collected works of Hasse.

In 1979, Leopoldt became a member of the Heidelberger Akademie der Wissenschaften.

See also

• Leopoldt's conjecture

References

1. Kubota, Leopoldt: Eine p-adische Theorie der Zetawerte I: Einführung der p-adischen Dirichletschen L-Funktionen, Journal für die Reine und Angewandte Mathematik, Bd.214/215, 1965, S.328-339, Online, Teil 2 von Leopoldt: Eine p-adische Theorie der Zetawerte 2, J.Reine Angew.Math., Bd.274/275, 1975, S.224
2. Leopoldt, Heinrich-Wolfgang; Roquette, Peter, eds. (1975), Helmut Hasse: Mathematische Abhandlungen, de Gruyter (3 vols.)

• 20th-century German mathematicians
• 1927 births
• 2011 deaths
• University of Hamburg alumni
• Academic staff of the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg
• Academic staff of the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology