Helmut Koch

He was a member of the Akademie der Wissenschaften der DDR. He is a full member of the Academy of Sciences Leopoldina, the Academia Europaea, and the Berlin-Brandenburgische Akademie der Wissenschaften. He is a corresponding member of the Heidelberger Akademie der Wissenschaften. In 1986 he was an Invited Speaker at the ICM in 1986 in Berkeley, California. In 1993 he became a member of the editorial staff of the Mathematische Nachrichten.

Koch was born in Potsdam. Koch studied from 1952 to 1957 at the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. From 1957 to 1959 he worked in the semiconductor plant at Teltow. From 1959 he was a member of the Institute for Mathematics of the Akademie der Wissenschaften der DDR, where he received in 1964 his promotion (Ph.D.) and in 1965 his habilitation. He studied under Hans Reichardt and Igor Shafarevich (1960/61 in Moscow). The famous "Number Theory" textbook by Shafarevich and Borevich was translated by Koch from Russian into German. Koch was from 1969 to 1991 the head of the research group at the Institute for Mathematics and from 1992 to 1996 the head of a working group at the Humboldt University, where he became a full professor in 1992. He was on research sabbaticals in Moscow, Saint Petersburg, and Novosibirsk and at the University of Paris, University of Montreal, University of Alberta, University of Cambridge, ETH Zürich, the Stefan Banach International Mathematical Center in Warsaw, and the Max-Planck-Institut für Mathematik in Bonn.

Helmut V. Koch (born 5 October 1932) is a German mathematician specializing in number theory.