Although he was a German Jew, Freudenthal's position in the Netherlands insulated him from the anti-Jewish laws that had been passed in Germany beginning with the Nazi rise to power in 1933. However, in 1940 the Germans invaded the Netherlands, following which Freudenthal was suspended from duties at the University of Amsterdam by the Nazis. In 1943 Freudenthal was sent to a labor camp in the village of Havelte in the Netherlands, but with the help of his wife (who, as a non-Jew, had not been deported) he escaped in 1944 and went into hiding with his family in occupied Amsterdam. During this period Freudenthal occupied his time in literary pursuits, including winning first prize under a false name in a novel-writing contest.
With the war over, Freudenthal's position at the University of Amsterdam was returned to him, but in 1946 he was given a chair in pure and applied mathematics and foundations of mathematics at Utrecht University, where he remained for the rest of his career. He served as the 8th president of the International Commission on Mathematical Instruction from 1967 to 1970. In 1971 he founded the Institute for the Development of Mathematical Education (IOWO) at Utrecht University, which after his death was renamed the Freudenthal Institute. In 1972 he founded and became editor-in-chief of the journal Geometriae Dedicata. He retired from his professorship in 1975 and from his journal editorship in 1981. He died in Utrecht in 1990, sitting on a bench in a park where he always took a morning walk.
In his thesis work, published as a journal article in 1931, Freudenthal introduced the concept of an end of a topological space. Ends are intended to capture the intuitive idea of a direction in which the space extends to infinity, but have a precise mathematical formulation in terms of covers of the space by nested sequences of compact sets. Ends remain of great importance in topological group theory, Freudenthal's motivating application, and also in other areas of mathematics such as the study of minimal surfaces.
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O'Connor, John J.; Robertson, Edmund F., "Hans Freudenthal", MacTutor History of Mathematics Archive, University of St Andrews /wiki/Edmund_F._Robertson
O'Connor, John J.; Robertson, Edmund F., "Hans Freudenthal", MacTutor History of Mathematics Archive, University of St Andrews /wiki/Edmund_F._Robertson
Bos, Henk J. M. (1992), "In memoriam Hans Freudenthal (1905–1990)", Historia Mathematica, 19 (1): 106–108, doi:10.1016/0315-0860(92)90070-R. /wiki/Doi_(identifier)
Prof. Dr. Hans Freudenthal (1905 - 1990), Freudenthal institute for science and mathematics education, archived from the original on 2013-10-20, retrieved 2013-01-10. https://web.archive.org/web/20131020201814/http://www.fi.uu.nl/en/freudenthal.html
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O'Connor, John J.; Robertson, Edmund F., "Hans Freudenthal", MacTutor History of Mathematics Archive, University of St Andrews /wiki/Edmund_F._Robertson
Bos, Henk J. M. (1992), "In memoriam Hans Freudenthal (1905–1990)", Historia Mathematica, 19 (1): 106–108, doi:10.1016/0315-0860(92)90070-R. /wiki/Doi_(identifier)
Müller-Hoissen, Folkert; Pallo, Jean Marcel (2012), Associahedra, Tamari Lattices and Related Structures: Tamari Memorial Festschrift, Progress in Mathematics, vol. 299, Springer, p. 20, ISBN 9783034804059. 9783034804059
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Pupils achievements internationally compared — the IEA. Educational Studies in Mathematics 6, 127–186. According to PISA critic Joachim Wuttke, some of the points Freudenthal made still apply to the most recent international school studies: unequal enrollment rates, the unsolved translation problem, lacking curricular validity, reading items that contain deeper science than the science items, overinterpretation of numerical outcomes, Kafkaesk confusion in the documentation and in the underlying decisions, dogmatic rejection of criticism [1]. /wiki/International_Association_for_the_Evaluation_of_Educational_Achievement
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Narens, Louis; Freudenthal, Hans (1973), "Review: Hans Freudenthal, Lincos. Design of a Language for Cosmic Intercourse. Part I", Journal of Symbolic Logic, 38 (3): 517, doi:10.2307/2273050, JSTOR 2273050, S2CID 118829652. /wiki/Louis_Narens
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