Heinrich-Wolfgang Leopoldt

Heinrich-Wolfgang Leopoldt (22 August 1927 – 28 July 2011) was a German mathematician who worked on algebraic number theory.

Leopoldt earned his Ph.D. in 1954 at the University of Hamburg under Helmut Hasse with the thesis Über Einheitengruppe und Klassenzahl reeller algebraischer Zahlkörper (On group of unity and class number of real algebraic number fields).

Leopoldt and Tomio Kubota introduced and investigated p-adic L-functions (now named after them).

[1] These functions are a component of Iwasawa theory and are a p-adic version of the Dirichlet L-functions.

With Hans Zassenhaus he also worked on computer algebra and its applications in number theory.