Winfried Scharlau

Winfried Scharlau (born 12 August 1940 in Berlin, died 26 November 2020) was a German mathematician.
Biography.
Scharlau received his doctorate in 1967 from the University of Bonn. His doctoral thesis "Quadratische Formen und Galois-Cohomologie" (Quadratic Forms and Galois Cohomology) was supervised by Friedrich Hirzebruch. Scharlau was at the Institute for Advanced Study for the academic year 1969–1970 and in spring 1972. From 1970 he was a professor (most recently "Institutsdirektor") at the University of Münster, where he has now retired.
Scharlau's research deals with number theory and, in particular, the theory of quadratic forms, about which he wrote a 1985 monograph "Quadratic and Hermitian Forms" in Springer's series "Grundlehren der mathematischen Wissenschaften".
Scharlau was also an amateur ornithologist and author of two novels, "I megali istoria - die große Geschichte" (2nd edition 2001), set on the Greek island of Naxos, and " Scharife " (2001), set on the island of Zanzibar in the 19th century. He also deals with the history of mathematics and wrote, with Hans Opolka, a historically-oriented introduction to number theory. Their book presents, among other topics, the analytical class number formula of Dirichlet and the geometry of the numbers in the 19th century. Scharlau wrote a multi-part biography of Alexander Grothendieck.
Scharlau was a corresponding member of the "Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Göttingen". From 1991 to 1992 he was president of the "Deutsche Mathematiker-Vereinigung". In 1974 he was invited speaker with talk "On subspaces of inner product spaces" at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Vancouver.
He was the father of the cognitive psychologist Ingrid Scharlau.