- Herman Müntz
(Chaim) Herman Müntz (1884-1956) was a German mathematician, now remembered for the
Müntz approximation theorem .He was born in
Łódź (then in thePiotrków Governorate of theRussian Empire , now inPoland ) in a secularJew ish family, who had adopted a German spelling of the surname Minc. He was educated there and at theFriedrich-Wilhelms-Universität in Berlin, graduating in 1906. He wrote a doctoral dissertation there onpartial differential equation s and thePlateau problem , in 1910, supervised byH. A. Schwarz .In 1911 he moved to
Munich . In the following years he published onprojective geometry ,iterative method s, andapproximation theory .In 1914 he took a teaching position in a school near
Heppenheim , and a year later another inHochwaldhausen . He became a German citizen in 1919. At around that time he suffered a breakdown, and moved back to Poland with his wife. He shortly began publishing mathematics again. The couple moved toGöttingen in 1921, and Müntz became involved in editorial, reviewing and translation work, as well as research. At this period, and from 1924 in Berlin, he was unsuccessfully trying to get an academic position, hampered because he had nothabilitated . In 1927 he worked closely withAlbert Einstein .In 1929 he took a professorial position at the
Leningrad State University , where he was active in teaching, research, administration and as an editor ofLyapunov . In 1932 he was an official Soviet delegate to theInternational Congress of Mathematicians ., withN. G. Chebotarev ,P. S. Alexandrov , andE. Y. Kolman , an ideological Marxist. In 1937 Müntz, who remained a German citizen, was expelled from the USSR. He went toSweden , where he supported himself by teaching. He obtained Swedish citizenship in 1953.He wrote extensively on
Judaism and related topics. In 1907 a book "Wir Juden" was published in Berlin. He was a correspondent ofMartin Buber , and wrote much for Buber's journal "Der Jude".References
*Müntz, Ch. H., "Über den Approximationssatz von Weierstrass", (1914) in H. A. Schwarz's Festschrift, pp. 303-312.
*E.L.Ortiz, A.Pinkus, "Herman Müntz: A Mathematician's Odyssey, Mathematical Intelligencer 27 (2005), 22-31 [http://www.math.technion.ac.il/~pinkus/papers/Muntz.pdf PDF from the site of Alan Pinkus] [http://www.math.technion.ac.il/~pinkus/papers/Muntz.doc DOC from the site of Alan Pinkus]External links
*MathGenealogy |id=47816
* [http://www.math.technion.ac.il/~pinkus/papers/Muntz.pdf PDF biography]
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