Menahem Max Schiffer (24 September 1911, Berlin – 11 November 1997)) was a German-born American mathematician who worked in complex analysis, partial differential equations, and mathematical physics.

Biography

Schiffer studied physics from 1930 at the

University of Bonn The Rhenish Friedrich Wilhelm University of Bonn (german: Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität Bonn) is a public research university located in Bonn, North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany. It was founded in its present form as the ( en, Rhine U ...

and then at the

Humboldt University of Berlin Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin (german: Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, abbreviated HU Berlin) is a German public research university in the central borough of Mitte in Berlin. It was established by Frederick William III on the initiative o ...

with a number of famous physicists and mathematicians including

Max von Laue Max Theodor Felix von Laue (; 9 October 1879 – 24 April 1960) was a German physicist who received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1914 for his discovery of the diffraction of X-rays by crystals. In addition to his scientific endeavors with cont ...

Erwin Schrödinger Erwin Rudolf Josef Alexander Schrödinger (, ; ; 12 August 1887 – 4 January 1961), sometimes written as or , was a Nobel Prize-winning Austrian physicist with Irish citizenship who developed a number of fundamental results in quantum theory ...

, Walter Nernst,

Erhard Schmidt Erhard Schmidt (13 January 1876 – 6 December 1959) was a Baltic German mathematician whose work significantly influenced the direction of mathematics in the twentieth century. Schmidt was born in Tartu (german: link=no, Dorpat), in the Govern ...

Issai Schur Issai Schur (10 January 1875 – 10 January 1941) was a Russian mathematician who worked in Germany for most of his life. He studied at the University of Berlin. He obtained his doctorate in 1901, became lecturer in 1903 and, after a stay at the ...

and

Ludwig Bieberbach Ludwig Georg Elias Moses Bieberbach (; 4 December 1886 – 1 September 1982) was a German mathematician and Nazi. Biography Born in Goddelau, near Darmstadt, he studied at Heidelberg and under Felix Klein at Göttingen, receiving his doctorate ...

. In Berlin he worked closely with Issai Schur. In 1934 Schiffer had his first mathematical publication. After the National Socialist regime removed Schur and many others from their academic posts, Schiffer, as a Jew, immigrated to British-controlled Palestine. On the basis of his 1934 mathematical publication, Schiffer received from the

Hebrew University of Jerusalem The Hebrew University of Jerusalem (HUJI; he, הַאוּנִיבֶרְסִיטָה הַעִבְרִית בִּירוּשָׁלַיִם) is a public research university based in Jerusalem, Israel. Co-founded by Albert Einstein and Dr. Chaim Weiz ...

his master's degree in 1934. He received there his doctorate in 1938 under

Michael Fekete Michael (Mihály) Fekete ( he, מיכאל פקטה; 19 July 1886 – 13 May 1957) was a Hungarian-Israeli mathematician. Biography Fekete was born in 1886 in Zenta, Austria-Hungary (today Senta, Serbia). He received his PhD in 1909 from ...

with thesis ''Conformal representation and univalent functions''. In his dissertation he introduced the "Schiffer variation", a variational method for handling geometric problems in complex analysis. (He also introduced another important variational method.) In September 1952, he became a professor at

Stanford University Stanford University, officially Leland Stanford Junior University, is a private research university in Stanford, California. The campus occupies , among the largest in the United States, and enrolls over 17,000 students. Stanford is consider ...

, as part of a Jewish refugee group of outstanding mathematical analysts, including

George Pólya George Pólya (; hu, Pólya György, ; December 13, 1887 – September 7, 1985) was a Hungarian mathematician. He was a professor of mathematics from 1914 to 1940 at ETH Zürich and from 1940 to 1953 at Stanford University. He made fundamental ...

Charles Loewner Charles Loewner (29 May 1893 – 8 January 1968) was an American mathematician. His name was Karel Löwner in Czech and Karl Löwner in German. Karl Loewner was born into a Jewish family in Lany, about 30 km from Prague, where his father Sig ...

Stefan Bergman Stefan Bergman (5 May 1895 – 6 June 1977) was a Congress Poland-born American mathematician whose primary work was in complex analysis. His name is also written Bergmann; he dropped the second "n" when he came to the U. S. He is best known for t ...

, and

Gábor Szegő Gábor Szegő () (January 20, 1895 – August 7, 1985) was a Hungarian-American mathematician. He was one of the foremost mathematical analysts of his generation and made fundamental contributions to the theory of orthogonal polynomials and T ...

. With

Paul Garabedian Paul Roesel Garabedian (August 2, 1927May 13, 2010) was a mathematician and numerical analysis, numerical analyst. Garabedian was the Director-Division of Computational Fluid Dynamics at the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences, New York Univ ...

, Schiffer worked on the

Bieberbach conjecture In complex analysis, de Branges's theorem, or the Bieberbach conjecture, is a theorem that gives a necessary condition on a holomorphic function in order for it to map the open unit disk of the complex plane injectively to the complex plane. It was ...

with a proof in 1955 of the special case n=4. He was a speaker (but not in the category of an Invited Speaker) at the

International Congress of Mathematicians The International Congress of Mathematicians (ICM) is the largest conference for the topic of mathematics. It meets once every four years, hosted by the International Mathematical Union (IMU). The Fields Medals, the Nevanlinna Prize (to be rename ...

(ICM) in 1950 at Cambridge, Massachusetts, and was a plenary speaker at the ICM in 1958 at Edinburgh with plenary address ''Extremum Problems and Variational Methods in Conformal Mapping''. In 1970 he was elected to the

United States National Academy of Sciences The National Academy of Sciences (NAS) is a United States nonprofit, non-governmental organization. NAS is part of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, along with the National Academy of Engineering (NAE) and the Nati ...

. He retired from Stanford University as professor emeritus in 1977. In 1981, Schiffer became a founding member of the

World Cultural Council The World Cultural Council is an international organization whose goals are to promote cultural values, goodwill and philanthropy among individuals. The organization founded in 1981 and based in Mexico, has held a yearly award ceremony since 198 ...

. Upon his death he was survived by his wife Fanya Rabinivics Schiffer, whom he married in 1937, and their daughter Dinah S. Singer, an experimental immunologist.

Selected publications

*with

Leon Bowden Leon, Léon (French) or León (Spanish) may refer to: Places Europe * León, Spain, capital city of the Province of León * Province of León, Spain * Kingdom of León, an independent state in the Iberian Peninsula from 910 to 1230 and again fro ...

The role of mathematics in science
Mathematical Association of America 1984 *with

: Kernel functions and elliptic differential equations in mathematical physics, Academic Press 1953 *with Donald Spencer: Functionals of finite Riemann Surfaces, Princeton 1954 *with Ronald Adler, Maurice Bazin: Introduction to General Relativity, McGraw Hill 1965 xvi+ 451 pp. Illus.

References

External links

* {{DEFAULTSORT:Schiffer, Menahem Max 1911 births 1997 deaths 20th-century American mathematicians Founding members of the World Cultural Council Mathematical analysts Jewish scientists Hebrew University of Jerusalem alumni Stanford University Department of Mathematics faculty Members of the United States National Academy of Sciences German emigrants to the United States