Helmut Maier

Helmut Maier (born 17 October 1953) is a German mathematician and professor at the University of Ulm, Germany. He is known for his contributions in analytic number theory and mathematical analysis and particularly for the so-called Maier's matrix method as well as Maier's theorem for primes in short intervals. He has also done important work in exponential sums and trigonometric sums over special sets of integers and the Riemann zeta function.

Education Helmut Maier graduated with a Diploma in Mathematics from the University of Ulm in 1976, under the supervision of Hans-Egon Richert. He received his PhD from the University of Minnesota in 1981, under the supervision of J. Ian Richards.

Research and academic positions Maier's PhD thesis was an extension of his paper Chains of large gaps between consecutive primes. In this paper Maier applied for the first time what is now known as Maier's matrix method. This method later on led him and other mathematicians to the discovery of unexpected irregularities in the distribution of prime numbers.

After postdoctoral positions at the University of Michigan and the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, Maier obtained a permanent position at the University of Georgia. While in Georgia he proved that the usual formulation of the Cramér model for the distribution of prime numbers is wrong. This was a completely unexpected result. Since 1993, Maier has been a professor at the University of Ulm, Germany.

Collaborators of Helmut Maier include Paul Erdős, C. Feiler, John Friedlander, Andrew Granville, D. Haase, A. J. Hildebrand, , J. W. Neuberger, A. Sankaranarayanan, A. Sárközy, Wolfgang P. Schleich, Cameron Leigh Stewart.