The European Mathematical Society

The first president of the European Mathematical Society, Friedrich Hirzebruch, has passed away. Fritz Hirzebruch studied mathematics at Münster. In 1956 he became professor at Bonn where he remained until his retirement. In 1980 he founded the Max-Planck-Institut fur Mathematik, serving as Director until 1995. His profound contributions to mathematics – in applications of topology to algebraic manifolds and number theory – and to German mathematical life, were honoured by many prizes, including that of the Wolf foundation in 1988 and the Georg Cantor medal of the DMV in 2004. He was honorary president of the 1998 International Congress of Mathematics in Berlin.
European mathematics has lost a great scholar and the EMS has lost one of its architects.
Detailed biographies: http://www-history.mcs.st-and.ac.uk/history/Biographies/Hirzebruch.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedrich_Hirzebruch