The historical development of Pontrjagin duality

This chapter has several aims. The first aim is a historical description of two parts of Lev Pontrjagin’s scientific work, namely his work on topological duality theorems, and his work on the theory of topological abelian groups, including the introduction of the duality named after him. In both cases, we can get a rather detailed picture of these histories from publications by him and other researchers, from the reviews contained in the Jahrbuch and elsewhere, from various biographic and autobiographical accounts concerning Pontrjagin himself or some of his contemporaries, from archival material available at the ETH Zurich (in particular, Heinz Hopf’s correspondence with Paul Alexandroff and other colleagues) and at the IAS Princeton, and from secondary literature.