Hans Lewy
| Hans Lewy | |
|---|---|
Hans Lewy in 1975
(photo by George Bergman) |
|
| Born |
October 20, 1904 Breslau |
| Died | August 23, 1988 (aged 83) Berkeley, California, United States of America |
| Nationality | United States of America |
| Fields | Mathematical analysis, partial differential equations, several complex variables |
| Alma mater | University of Göttingen |
| Doctoral advisor | Richard Courant |
| Doctoral students |
David Kinderlehrer Russell Lehman Arvid Lonseth Richard MacCamy |
| Known for | Courant–Friedrichs–Lewy condition, Lewy's example |
| Influenced | numerical analysis, partial differential equations, several complex variables |
| Notable awards | Wolf prize (1986) |
Hans Lewy (20 October 1904 – 23 August 1988) was a German born American mathematician, known for his work on partial differential equations and on the theory of functions of several complex variables.
Lewy was born in Breslau, Germany (now Wrocław, Poland), on October 20, 1904. He began his studies at the University of Göttingen in 1922, after being advised to avoid the more local University of Breslau because it was too old-fashioned, supporting himself during the Weimar hyperinflation by a side job doing railroad track maintenance. At Göttingen, he studied both mathematics and physics; his teachers there included Max Born, Richard Courant, James Franck, David Hilbert, Edmund Landau, Emmy Noether, and Alexander Ostrowski. He earned his doctorate in 1926, at which time he and his friend Kurt Otto Friedrichs both became assistants to Courant and privatdozents at Göttingen.
At the recommendation of Courant, Lewy was granted a Rockefeller Fellowship, which he used in 1929 to travel to Rome and study algebraic geometry with Tullio Levi-Civita and Federigo Enriques, and then in 1930 to travel to Paris, where he attended the seminar of Jacques Hadamard. After Hitler's election as chancellor in 1933, Lewy was advised by Herbert Busemann to leave Germany again. He was offered a position in Madrid, but declined it, fearing for the future there under Francisco Franco. He revisited Italy and France, but then at the invitation of the Emergency Committee in Aid of Displaced Foreign Scholars and with the assistance of Hadamard found a two-year position in America at Brown University. At the end of that term, in 1935, he moved to the University of California, Berkeley.
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