Paul Bernays

Paul Bernays
Autumn 1949 in Oberwolfach
Born	(1888-10-17)17 October 1888 London, United Kingdom
Died	18 September 1977(1977-09-18) (aged 88) Zurich, Switzerland
Nationality	Swiss
Fields	Mathematics
Alma mater	University of Berlin
Thesis	Über die Darstellung von positiven, ganzen Zahlen durch die primitiven, binären quadratischen Formen einer nicht-quadratischen Diskriminante (1912)
Doctoral advisor	Edmund Landau
Doctoral students	Corrado Böhm Julius Richard Büchi Haskell Curry Erwin Engeler Gerhard Gentzen Saunders Mac Lane
Known for	Mathematical logic Axiomatic set theory Philosophy of mathematics
Influences	Issai Schur, Edmund Landau

Paul Isaac Bernays (17 October 1888 – 18 September 1977) was a Swiss mathematician, who made significant contributions to mathematical logic, axiomatic set theory, and the philosophy of mathematics. He was an assistant and close collaborator of David Hilbert.

Bernays spent his childhood in Berlin, and attended the Köllner Gymnasium, 1895-1907. At the University of Berlin, he studied mathematics under Issai Schur, Edmund Landau, Ferdinand Georg Frobenius, and Friedrich Schottky; philosophy under Alois Riehl, Carl Stumpf and Ernst Cassirer; and physics under Max Planck. At the University of Göttingen, he studied mathematics under David Hilbert, Edmund Landau, Hermann Weyl, and Felix Klein; physics under Voigt and Max Born; and philosophy under Leonard Nelson.

In 1912, the University of Berlin awarded him a Ph.D. in mathematics, for a thesis, supervised by Landau, on the analytic number theory of binary quadratic forms. That same year, the University of Zurich awarded him the Habilitation for a thesis on complex analysis and Picard's theorem. The examiner was Ernst Zermelo. Bernays was Privatdozent at the University of Zurich, 1912–17, where he came to know George Pólya.