Wolfgang Gröbner’s great scientific merits lie in the study of the theory of LIE series, through which he created a nonlinear perturbation theory that proved to be an extraordinarily suitable instrument for computation in celestial mechanics.
According to the method he found, various tasks and problems in celestial mechanics, astronautics, and reactor physics were successfully treated at several universities, including those commissioned by NASA. In the 1930s he worked as a private scholar who also built small power plants in South Tyrol.
Since he opted for Germany as a South Tyrolean, he went to Germany and built an air force institute for the application of higher mathematical methods. The industrial mathematics group headed by Gröbner produced integral tables and comparisons of the expected hit probability of machine guns and shrapnel. After the end of World War II, Gröbner was appointed to the University of Innsbruck.