Wolfgang Franz (born 4 October 1905 in Magdeburg, Germany; died 26 April 1996[1]) was a German mathematician[2][3] who specialised in topology particularly in 3-manifolds, which he generalized to higher dimensions.
During World War II Franz led a group of five mathematicians, recruited by Wilhelm Fenner, and which included Ernst Witt, Georg Aumann, Alexander Aigner, Oswald Teichmüller and Johann Friedrich Schultze, to form the backbone of the new mathematical research department in the field of cryptology, in the late 1930s.
He was promoted in 1930 to Dr Phil on David Hilbert's Irreduzibilitätssatz problem, with a doctoral thesis titled: Investigations on Hilbert's irreducibility (German:Untersuchungen zum Hilbertschen Irreduzibilitätssatz)[9] in Halle, his doctoral advisor was Helmut Hasse (after he had started a dissertation with a different topic under Ernst Steinitz, but he died).
The faculty's application states: In the Second World War, he worked in the OKW/Chi, the cipher bureau of the High Command of the Wehrmacht.
Franz first successfully solved Mexican and Greek codes and then the M-138-A Strip Cipher of the US Department of Foreign Affairs (named by the Germans as Am-10).
During this time, he supervised about twenty PhD theses and numerous habilitations, including those of Wolfgang Haken.