Moritz Abraham Stern (29 June 1807 – 30 January 1894) was a German mathematician. Stern became ''Ordinarius'' (full professor) at

Göttingen University Göttingen (, , ; nds, Chöttingen) is a university city in Lower Saxony, central Germany, the capital of the eponymous district. The River Leine runs through it. At the end of 2019, the population was 118,911. General information The o ...

in 1858, succeeding

Carl Friedrich Gauss Johann Carl Friedrich Gauss (; german: Gauß ; la, Carolus Fridericus Gauss; 30 April 177723 February 1855) was a German mathematician and physicist who made significant contributions to many fields in mathematics and science. Sometimes refer ...

. Stern was the first

Jewish Jews ( he, יְהוּדִים, , ) or Jewish people are an ethnoreligious group and nation originating from the Israelites Israelite origins and kingdom: "The first act in the long drama of Jewish history is the age of the Israelites""The ...

full professor at a German university who attained the position without changing his Jewish religion. Although

Carl Gustav Jacobi Carl Gustav Jacob Jacobi (; ; 10 December 1804 – 18 February 1851) was a German mathematician who made fundamental contributions to elliptic functions, dynamics, differential equations, determinants, and number theory. His name is occas ...

preceded him (by three decades) as the first Jew to obtain a math professorial chair in Germany, Jacobi's family had converted to Christianity long before then. As a professor, Stern taught Gauss's student Bernhard Riemann. Stern was very helpful to

Gotthold Eisenstein Ferdinand Gotthold Max Eisenstein (16 April 1823 – 11 October 1852) was a German mathematician. He specialized in number theory and analysis, and proved several results that eluded even Gauss. Like Galois and Abel before him, Eisenstein died ...

in formulating a proof of the

quadratic reciprocity In number theory, the law of quadratic reciprocity is a theorem about modular arithmetic that gives conditions for the solvability of quadratic equations modulo prime numbers. Due to its subtlety, it has many formulations, but the most standard st ...

theorem. Stern was interested in

primes A prime number (or a prime) is a natural number greater than 1 that is not a product of two smaller natural numbers. A natural number greater than 1 that is not prime is called a composite number. For example, 5 is prime because the only ways ...

that cannot be expressed as the sum of a prime and twice a square (now known as Stern primes). He is known for formulating

Stern's diatomic series Stern's (originally Stern Brothers) was a regional department store chain serving the U.S. states of New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania. The chain was in business for more than 130 years. In 2001, Stern's parent company Federated Department ...

. :1, 1, 2, 1, 3, 2, 3, 1, 4, … that counts the number of ways to write a number as a sum of powers of two with no power used more than twice. He is also known for the Stern–Brocot tree, which he wrote about in 1858 and which Brocot independently discovered in 1861.

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* * {{DEFAULTSORT:Stern, Moritz Abraham 1807 births 1894 deaths 19th-century German Jews 19th-century German mathematicians University of Göttingen faculty