Hans Arnold Heilbronn FRS[1] (8 October 1908 – 28 April 1975) was a mathematician.
He was a student at the universities of Berlin, Freiburg and Göttingen, where he met Edmund Landau, who supervised his doctorate.
In his thesis, he improved a result of Hoheisel on the size of prime gaps.
Heilbronn fled Germany for Britain in 1933 due to the rise of Nazism.
He arrived in Cambridge, then found accommodation in Manchester and eventually was offered a position at Bristol University, where he stayed for about one and a half years.
does, as well as, in collaboration with Edward Linfoot, that there are at most ten quadratic number fields of the form
On invitation of Louis Mordell he moved back to Manchester in 1934, but left again only one year later, accepting the Bevan Fellowship at Trinity College, Cambridge.
In Cambridge Heilbronn published several joint papers with Harold Davenport, in one of which they devised a new variant of the Hardy-Littlewood circle method, now sometimes referred to as the Davenport-Heilbronn method, proving that for any indefinite diagonal form
During the Second World War he was briefly interned as an enemy alien but released to serve in the British Army.
In 1946 he returned to Bristol, becoming Henry Overton Wills Professor of Mathematics.
His PhD students include Inder Chowla, Tom Callahan and Albrecht Fröhlich.