Wolfgang Döblin, a lost genius
On February 28, 1933, the day after the Reichstag fire, Alfred Döblin-Jew, leftist and anti-Nazism-flees to Zurich with his wife and the youngest of his children. Wolfgang follows them in April of that same year, after having passed in Berlin his Abitur -equivalent to the selectivity-. In the autumn of 1933, the family settled in France.
Wolfgang resumed his higher education - started in Zurich - and in 1935 he began to work on probability theory under the direction of Maurice Fréchet. His work focuses on Markov chains, and he is interested in continuous-time processes, an area in full development at that time, especially thanks to the work of Andréi Kolmogórov.
In October 1936, he obtained - along with his parents and brothers - the French nationality: he changed his name to Vincent Doblin, although in his mathematical works, he continued to sign as Wolfgang Döblin.
Wolfgang defends his thesis - entitled Sur les propriétés asymptotiques de mouvements régis par certains types of simple chaînes - in March 1938, under the direction of Maurice Fréchet and Paul Lévy.
In November 1938, he joined the compulsory military service for two years, and despite his occupations, managed to continue his scientific work, attacking, among others, the Chapman-Kolmogorov equation.
At the end of August 1939, he entered as a telephone operator in the 291th Infantry Regiment, located in the Ardennes. At that time, he finalized the writing of his memory Sur l'équation de Kolmogoroff and sent it as a sealed document to the Académie des sciences -pli cacheté 11-668-: according to this procedure, unless the author's will or express authorization of his heirs, only the opening of the document is allowed after one hundred years since its deposit.
Before the capitulation of France, on June 22, 1940, Wolfgang separates from his comrades and takes refuge in a farm in Housseras (Vosges), burns his papers - fearing that his knowledge is stolen - and commits suicide by shooting in head, before falling into the hands of the Nazis. That same day he is buried in a grave dug near the apse of the church, next to French and German soldiers fallen during the combats.
The memory of Döblin sent to the Académie des sciences opens before the one hundred stipulated years, on May 18, 2000, with the permission of his brother Claude: it is then verified that this manuscript contains, in essence, everything demonstrated in the field of probabilities since the end of the war. These works, very advanced for their time, place Wolfgang Döblin among the great innovators of modern probability calculation.
In the book [2], Marc Petit traces the history of the mathematician, his family and his mathematical environment. The author states in the text that his intention is to 'reconcile' Alfred Döblin - little tied to the family - and his son Wolfgang, two people who knew little and with radically different personalities.
Le lien o le face-à-face between Alfred and Wolfgang ne sont pas seulement ceux d'un père et d'un fils. Quand deux genies rencontrent ainsi, ou bien s'ignorent, l'un romancier, l'autre mathématicien, chacun entièrement dévoué à son art, devour par lui, ce ne sont pas seulement deux personnes qui s'affrontent, mais ce que l 'on appelait pompeusement naguère les Lettres et les Sciences. Ces deux territories, ces deux domaines d'activite de l'esprit humain se rejoignent-ils?
Excerpted from [2], pp. 129-130
Alfred and Wolfgangno are the only ones of a father and a son. When two geniuses are found like that, or they are ignored, the one novelist, the other mathematician, each dedicated completely to his art, devoured by him, is not just two people face, but of what was called pompously Letters and Sciences. These two territories, these two fields of activity of the human mind, do they meet?
References:
[1] W. Doeblin, Sur l'équation de Kolmogoroff, Comptes-Rendus à l'Académie des sciences de Paris, série 1, 331, 1031-1187, 2000.
[2] Marc Petit, L'équation de Kolmogoroff. Vie et mort by Wolfgang Doeblin, a génie dans la tourmente nazie, Gallimard, 2003.
[3] Wolfgang Doeblin, MacTutor History of Mathematics Archive
About the author: Marta Macho Stadler is a professor of Topology in the Mathematics Department of the UPV / EHU, and assiduous collaborator in ZTFNews, the blog of the Faculty of Science and Technology of this university.