Lipman bers biography of william butler

Lipman Bers Latvian : Lipmans Berss ; May 22, — October 29, was a Latvian-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 Czars, and spent several years as a child in Saint Petersburg ; his family returned to Riga in approximately , 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.

Lipman bers biography of william butler: Walter Lippmann was the most

Bers received his Ph. Having applied for postdoctoral studies in Paris, he was given a visa to go to France soon after the Munich Agreement , by which Nazi Germany annexed the Sudetenland. 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, 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. After the war, Bers found an assistant professorship at Syracuse University — , before moving to New York University — and then Columbia University — , where he became the Davies Professor of Mathematics, [ 3 ] [ 4 ] and where he chaired the mathematics department from to