Kurt Hensel

Born in Königsberg on December 29, 1861, Kurt Hensel studied mathematics at Berlin and Bonn and completed his doctorate under Leopold Kronecker. He later became a professor at the University of Berlin, where he worked for decades and built a strong reputation in number theory.

Hensel is remembered above all for creating p-adic numbers, introduced around 1897. The idea gave mathematicians a powerful new way to study arithmetic by looking at numbers through divisibility by a chosen prime, and it became one of the central tools of modern algebraic number theory.

Beyond his research, he edited Kronecker’s collected works and wrote textbooks and lectures that helped spread advanced mathematics to new generations. He died on June 1, 1941, but his name lives on through Hensel’s lemma and the p-adic methods that remain fundamental in mathematics.