Prof Kurt Mahler
Portrait Anecdotes
by Heide Smith
The Sitting
I was commissioned to photograph Prof Mahler by the ANU in 1987. The request was for a portrait in front of a bookshelf, to be framed and hung in the ANU “rogues gallery”. I photographed him as per my brief, and it worked out very well. When I asked Prof Mahler if I could take a few extra shots for my own collection, he agreed. I wanted to portray him within a geometric composition, a setting that I felt was more appropriate for a mathematician. I asked if he had some papers on mathematics that we could use, and he produced a “Royal Society Corporate Plan 1987”, which I carefully arranged. So this portrait is completely set up, yet in my view it shows not only the professor of mathematics, but Kurt Mahler the man. I used window light and a reflector; I never use flash if there is an alternative, because it changes the mood of the image altogether.
Prof Mahler was a very keen photographer himself, and we spoke at length about his photography during the sitting. A few years later I happened to be at an auction in Canberra, where I saw a Rollei camera, complete with lenses and filters, in immaculate condition, all in a beautiful case. To my amazement I discovered that it had belonged to Kurt Mahler, and I could not resist buying it.
The Sitter
Kurt Mahler lived for mathematics, yet had his father not found one of his son’s papers, and submitted it to the director of the local grammar school in Krefeld Germany in 1921, he might have completed his apprenticeship in a machine factory, and become a precision tool and instrument maker. Because of childhood tuberculosis he had received only four years of schooling by the age of fourteen, and much of his mathematical knowledge was self taught. He was offered the chance of sitting for the university entrance examination, and after studying at home for two years, and with the assistance of the grammar school teachers, passed in 1923. Mahler studied in Frankfurt and Gottingen before receiving his doctorate in 1927, but realizing that he had no future in Germany under Hitler, left to study and lecture overseas in 1933. He finally settled in Manchester in 1937, but was interned as an “enemy alien” in 1940!
While still interned, he was awarded a ScD degree by the University of Manchester. By 1949 he had become Reader at the University, and in 1952 the first personal chair in the history of the University was created for him. When a colleague of Mahler at Manchester, B.H.Neumann, set up a new department of Mathematics at ANU and offered him a research professorship in 1963, he was happy to accept. Apart from a four year spell at Ohio State University from 1968-1972, Kurt Mahler continued to work, study and live in Canberra, until his death in 1988. His awards included; 1948 Fellow of the Royal Society (British), 1965 Fellow of the Australian Academy of Science. The London Mathematical Society awarded him the Senior Berwick Prize in 1950, and the De Morgan Prize in 1971. He was made an honorary member of the Dutch Mathematical Society in 1957, and the Australian Mathematical Society in 1986.
