Lipman Bers

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Lipman Bers (called Lipa Bers ; * May 22, 1914 in Riga ; † October 29, 1993 in New Rochelle in New York ) was a Latvian- born American mathematician who mainly dealt with function theory , differential geometry and partial differential equations .

life and work

Bers was born into a family of secular Jewish school teachers (his father ran the Yiddish-language grammar school, his mother a Yiddish-language elementary school). In his childhood in Riga (then part of Russia) and St. Petersburg , where the family moved, he experienced the upheavals of the Russian Revolution . In 1918 they were back in Riga and partly in Berlin, where his mother was trained in psychoanalysis. Bers first studied mathematics in Zurich and then in Riga, but as an active social democrat he had to leave the country before imminent arrest (Latvia was dictatorially ruled after a coup in 1934 ). In 1938 he went to Prague with his old schoolmate Mary Kagan , where they both married. In 1938 he did his doctorate at the Charles University in Prague under Karl Löwner on a potential theoretical topic. When the German troops marched in, he was able to emigrate to the USA via Paris and unoccupied France in 1940, where his mother was already. In 1942 he received an assistant post at Brown University , where he (like his former teacher Löwner) dealt with aerodynamic calculations important to the war effort. From 1945 to 1949 he was (like Löwner) at Syracuse University , first as an assistant professor and then as an "associate professor". Here he was able to apply his research on aerodynamics in wartime to the study of the singularities of partial differential equations that describe minimal surfaces. From 1949 to 1951 he was at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton , where he met Lars Ahlfors and began his occupation with Klein's groups, Teichmüller theory and quasi-conformal images, which would become his main field of work in the future. Together with Ahlfors, he was significantly involved in providing strict proofs for Oswald Teichmüller's theory about the modular spaces of compact Riemann surfaces, which he developed more intuitively. He also developed the theory of pseudoanalytic functions (book "Theory of pseudoanalytic functions" 1953) - where solutions of linear elliptic partial differential equations of the second order are considered in analogy to analytical functions as solutions of the Laplace equation. In 1951 he became a professor at the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences of New York University . In 1964 he went to Columbia University , where he stayed until his retirement in 1984 (from 1972 "Davies Professor of Mathematics"). In 1968 he was visiting professor at Berkeley .

1959/60 Bers was Guggenheim and Fulbright Fellow. He was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1961), the American Philosophical Society (1980), the New York Academy of Sciences , the National Academy of Sciences (where he established a human rights committee), the London Mathematical Society and the Finnish Academy of Sciences . From 1963 to 1965 he was Vice President and from 1975 to 1977 President of the American Mathematical Society (AMS). In 1974 he received the Leroy P. Steele Prize from the American Mathematical Society. In 1958 he was invited speaker at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Edinburgh (Spaces of Riemann surfaces).

His doctoral students include Bernard Maskit , Irwin Kra , Linda Keen , Frederick Gardiner , Raymond Wells , Martin Schechter , Enrico Arbarello , Murray H. Protter .

Fonts

  • Bers "Selected Works", 2 vols. (Editor Kra, Maskit), AMS 1998
  • Bers "Finite dimensional Teichmüller spaces and generalizations", Bulletin AMS, New Series, Vol. 5, 1981, pp. 131-172
  • Bers "Uniformization, moduli and Kleinian groups", Bulletin London Mathematical Society, Vol. 4, 1972, pp. 257-300
  • Bers, Fritz John, Martin Schechter "Partial Differential Equations", Interscience 1964
  • Bers et al. a. "A crash course in Kleinian Groups", Springer 1974
  • Bers "Introduction to several complex variables", Courant Institute 1964
  • Bers "Riemann Surfaces", Courant Institute 1958

literature

  • Donald J. Albers, GL Alexanderson, Constance Reid More Mathematical People - Contemporary Conversations , Academic Press 1994

See also

Web links

Remarks

  1. ^ In 1958 he wrote a book about it, "The Mathematical Theory of Subsonic and Transonic Gas Dynamics", Wiley
  2. ^ Bers "Isolated singularities of minimal surfaces", Annals of Mathematics, Vol. 53, 1951, p. 364
  3. ↑ especially in the 1960s in collaboration with Ahlfors.
  4. ↑ However, due to the war, Teichmüller had little time for elaborations. Politically, as a convinced National Socialist, he was from the opposite political spectrum of the socialist views inclined to Ber, which the latter commented with a quote from Plutarch: It is not necessarily the case that the author of a beautiful work deserves admiration as a personality.
  5. ↑ announced in the lecture “Spaces of Riemann Surfaces” at the ICM in Edinburgh 1958. More detailed in “Quasiconformal mappings and Teichmüller's theorem” in “Analytic Functions”, Princeton 1960
personal data
SURNAME Bers, Lipman
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American mathematician
DATE OF BIRTH May 22, 1914
PLACE OF BIRTH Riga , Latvia
DATE OF DEATH October 29, 1993
Place of death New Rochelle