A Commemorative Plate for Wilhelm Killing and Karl Weierstra

摘要

A search for ‘‘The Greatest Mathematical Paper of All Time’’ on Google, MathSciNet, or ‘‘Zentralblatt fu¨r Mathematik’’ unvaryingly leads to the work of Wilhelm Killing (1847–1923). His classification of simple Lie algebras over the complex numbers is a favorite keyword as well. Killing discovered them while a professor at the Lyceum Hosianum in Braniewo, Poland. In the 19th century, Braunsberg or Braniewo belonged to East Prussia, in Germany, but it became a Polish city after the Second World War, and thus its name changed.