Peter Dembowski

Heinz Peter Dembowski (1 April 1928, Berlin – 28 January 1971, Tübingen) was a German mathematician, specializing in combinatorics.

At Illinois he met Reinhold Baer, with whom he returned to Frankfurt in 1956 and received in 1957 his doctorate with thesis Verallgemeinerungen von Transitivitätsklassen endlicher projektiver Ebenen (Generalizations of Transitive Classes of Finite Projective Planes).

In 1969 he was appointed to a professorial chair at the University of Tübingen, where he remained until his death in 1971.

[5] The primary focus of Dembowski's research was finite geometries and their interrelations with group theory, about which he wrote an authoritative textbook.

He proved the theorem, famous in finite geometry, that every inversive plane of even order n is isomorphic to the system of points and plane sections of an ovoid in a three-dimensional projective space over GF(n).