Hans Lewy

Hans Lewy
Hans Lewy in 1975 (photo by George Bergman)
Born	(1904-10-20)October 20, 1904 Breslau
Died	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.

Life

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.

During World War II, Lewy obtained a pilot's license, but then worked at the Aberdeen Proving Ground. He married Helen Crosby in 1947.

In 1950, Lewy was fired from Berkeley for refusing to sign a loyalty oath. He taught at Harvard University and Stanford University in 1952 and 1953 before being reinstated by the California Supreme Court case Tolman v. Underhill.

He retired from Berkeley in 1972, and in 1973 became one of two Ordway Professors of Mathematics at the University of Minnesota. He died on August 23, 1988, in Berkeley.

Awards and honors

Lewy was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1964, and was also a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He became a foreign member of the Accademia dei Lincei in 1972. He was awarded a Leroy P. Steele Prize in 1979, and a Wolf Prize in Mathematics in 1986 for his work on partial differential equations. In 1986, the University of Bonn gave him an honorary doctorate.

Publications

A selection of his work, edited by David Kinderlehrer and including his most important works, was published as the two volume work (Kinderlehrer 2002a) and (Kinderlehrer 2002b)

• . With biographical essays by Helen Lewy and Constance Reid, and commentaries on Lewy's work by Erhard Heinz, Peter D. Lax, Jean Leray, Richard MacCamy, Louis Nirenberg and François Treves.
• .

The following works are included in his "Selecta" in their original language or translated form.

• . There are also two English translations of the 1928 German original paper: the first one is a translation from the German by Phyllis Fox, circulated as a research report: . The second one is a typographical improvement of the first, published by IBM as: . A freely downlodable version of this one can be found here
• .
• .

See also

• Lewy's example
• Courant–Friedrichs–Lewy condition

External links

• .
• . An audio interview, available at eCommons@Cornell from the [Eugene B. Dynkin Collection of Mathematics Interviews Eugene B. Dynkin Collection of Mathematics Interviews ].
• . The biographical entry about Hans Lewy at the Enciclopedia Treccani.
• .