Lipman Bers
| Lipman Bers | |
|---|---|
| Born |
May 22, 1914 Riga, Governorate of Livonia |
| Died | October 29, 1993 (aged 79) New Rochelle, New York |
| Nationality | American |
| Fields | Mathematics |
| Institutions |
New York University Columbia University Brown University Syracuse University |
| Alma mater | Karl-Ferdinands-Universität |
| Doctoral advisor | Charles Loewner |
| Doctoral students |
Enrico Arbarello Jane Piore Gilman Irwin Kra Linda Keen Murray H. Protter Lesley Sibner Raymond O. Wells, Jr. |
| Notable awards | Leroy P. Steele Prize (1975) |
Lipman "Lipa" Bers (Latvian: Lipmans Berss; May 22, 1914 – October 29, 1993) was an American mathematician born in Riga who created the theory of pseudoanalytic functions and worked on Riemann surfaces and Kleinian groups. He was also known for his work in human rights activism.
Bers was born in Riga, then under the rule of the Russian Csars, and spent several years as a child in Saint Petersburg; his family returned to Riga in approximately 1919, by which time it was part of independent Latvia. In Riga, his mother was the principal of a Jewish elementary school, and his father became the principal of a Jewish high school, both of which Bers attended, with an interlude in Berlin while his mother, by then separated from his father, attended the Berlin Psychoanalytic Institute. After high school, Bers studied at the University of Zurich for a year, but had to return to Riga again because of the difficulty of transferring money from Latvia in the international financial crisis of the time. He continued his studies at the University of Riga, where he became active in socialist politics, including giving political speeches and working for an underground newspaper. In the aftermath of the Latvian coup in 1934 by right-wing leader Kārlis Ulmanis, Bers was targeted for arrest but fled the country, first to Estonia and then to Czechoslovakia.
Bers received his Ph.D. in 1938 from the University of Prague. He had begun his studies in Prague with Rudolf Carnap, but when Carnap moved to the US he switched to Charles Loewner, who would eventually become his thesis advisor. In Prague, he lived with an aunt, and married his wife Mary (née Kagan) whom he had met in elementary school and who had followed him from Riga. Having applied for postdoctoral studies in Paris, he was given a visa to go to France soon after the Munich Agreement, in which Nazi Germany annexed Czechoslovakia. He and his wife Mary had a daughter in Paris. They were unable to obtain a visa there to emigrate to the US, as the Latvian quota had filled, so they escaped to the south of France ten days before the fall of Paris, and eventually obtained an emergency US visa in Marseilles, one of a group of 10,000 visas set aside for political refugees by Eleanor Roosevelt. The Bers family rejoined Bers' mother, who had by then moved to New York City and become a psychoanalyst, married to thespian Beno Tumarin. At this time, Bers worked for a small Yiddish research agency, YIVO.
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