Friedrich Hirzebruch – a handful of reminiscences∗

The idea of dedicating an IMPANGA volume to Friedrich Hirzebruch arose a few years ago. A lot has changed since then. First of all, Friedrich Hirzebruch passed away on May 27, 2012. Following his death many conferences, lectures and articles [2, 4, 3, 22] were dedicated to him. The articles [1, 5, 7, 9] and the video-interview [13] appeared while he was still alive. A book by Winfried Scharlau is in preparation. These publications accurately describe the life and work of Professor Friedrich Hirzebruch from the point of view of his close colleagues and coworkers. Therefore, though initially I intended to write an article about him similar to “Notes on the life and work of Alexander Grothendieck” [16] (1st volume of IMPANGA Lecture Notes) or the one on Józef Maria Hoene-Wroński [17] (2nd volume of IMPANGA Lecture Notes), I decided to change my plans, so this essay will be of a different nature. I would like to share a collection of reminiscences about Professor Friedrich Hirzebruch from the vantage of a person, for whom he was a mentor in the years 1993–2006. In addition, I would like to highlight his relations with IMPANGA.