“He was a friend of the greatest geniuses of his time – indeed, he was one of them” – Ludwig Hopf (1884-1939)

peer-reviewedThis article concentrates on the life and work of Ludwig Hopf, including the effects the Nazi regime had on him and his time in Dublin where he arrived in July 1939 as a “Refugee of distinction”, some five months before his death, in order to teach at Trinity College Dublin. Born in 1884 in Nuremberg he studied Mathematics and Physics at Berlin, Munich and Zurich. For his PhD he was supervised by Arnold Sommerfeld in Munich. Later he worked in Zurich and Prague as Albert Einstein’s assistant before moving to Aachen where in 1923 he became professor for mathematics at the Technical University. Suspended in 1933 and pensioned off in 1934 he tried to support the emigration of his four sons and searched for a long time in vain to find a new academic home for himself before he could emigrate in spring 1939 to England where the invitation from Ireland reached him